I had looked forward to reading the book and was pleased when it recently appeared as a 99p daily deal but I quickly realised I wasn't enjoying it. A surplus of hindsight also gets in the way: Brooke-Smith tracks the consequences of the upheavals of the Nineties more effectively than he conveys how it felt to live through them. O’Connell was born in 1997, so this wasn’t personal nostalgia; rather it was a latecomer’s envious longing for a time when, at least if you were young and living in the West, history seemed to be on your side. In the 1980s, he was one of the first editors of i-D, before becoming a Contributing Editor of The Face and Editor of Arena.

Firstly, the layout, you have chapters in the way of months in 1995, with little bullet points at the beginning detailing what happened that month. Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emin's tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown's Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday).It's enthralling but sometimes repetitive and I felt very much lost in the easy listening chapter as it meant next to nothing to me in a book that is altogether London centric.

Not only was the mid-Nineties perhaps the last time that rock stars, music journalists and pop consumers held onto a belief in rock’s mystical power, it was a period of huge cultural upheaval – in art, literature, publishing and drugs.uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited. This is a book that takes place before the feeding frenzies and corporatisation of seemingly every art form, where there existed freedom to cause a fuss and use that as a way to market yourself. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

Although Jones throws in a few sceptical voices, a quote from Blur’s Alex James captures the doggedly celebratory tone: ‘What a totally, utterly brilliant decade.However, it becomes boring and repetitive real quick and everyone is like chatting about how the 90s was wonderful and constant comparison to the 60s. by Black Grape, Exit Planet Dust by the Chemical Brothers, I Should Coco by Supergrass, Elastica by Elastica, Pure Phase by Spiritualized, . From the YBAs to Britpop to Football, politics, easy listening and The Beatles we discovered what made the 90s tick (besides copious amounts of cocaine) and stick in our collective conscience. Both interpretations are somewhat true, but you won’t find much ambivalence or (that essential Nineties quality) irony in Faster Than a Cannonball. For anyone interested in what the Nineties signified beyond the M25, Brooke-Smith’s attempt to sum up the ‘pre-post-everything decade’ is refreshingly ambitious.

There were also hundreds of interesting anecdotes and opinion pieces from many of the main players of the various 90's scenes such as Noel Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Tony Blair and Tracey Emin and these were my favourite part of the book. Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emin’s tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown’s Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). Each chapter starts with a few bullet points about what happened in that month, but then you get like an interview style breakdown focusing solely on one thing. It's an illuminating volume equating the 90s to a retread of the swinging 60s, but a further three decades removed it appears as the last time young working class Britain made its voice properly heard, but I would certainly acknowledge it was a predominantly white led furore, but we were selling exciting ideas in a raw form that we can no longer do given the corporatisation of all facets of life and the squeaky clean sheen given to everything. Considering the hold that Britpop had on the nation's psyche in the nineties, it's amazing how short-loved the movement was.There's a chapter on the emergence of lad culture and lad magazines but there's no sort of self reflection on the deeper misogyny of it all. While those who lived through it tend to celebrate its explosive confidence, younger critics on the Left damn it for the complacency it induced and argue that we are now living with the crises – political, economic, technological – that the Nineties seeded.