He brilliantly ties together The Matrix and You’ve Got Mail, seeing them as ‘relics of an era when it was still possible to see cyberspace and the real world as two separate domains of reality’. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the book as I actually found some of those chapters more interesting than the music ones such as the chapter focusing on politics and the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour. The comparison ultimately produces bathos, as we see the decade’s utopian promise smothered by money and cocaine rather than Nixon and Vietnam. It wasn't for me but that's not to say it won't be enjoyed by others, give it a go if you enjoy this kind of book and have an interest in 1990's culture. Dylan Jones' books (at least the Bowie and New Romantic ones - as well as this) are over-long and under-edited - but I really enjoyed the nostalgia, which brought back good memories of what was a fun decade.

I did read a review that describes this book as a “circle jerk” and whilst I don’t agree, there is a boys club insider vibe to this book at times but the author freely acknowledges that the white English male rock culture did come to dominate the 90s narrative. But then the chapter would be devoted to a particular topic that focused more on the decade at large than the isolated year. Towards the end director Steve McQueen makes a comment that the rise of BritPop and Cool Britannia etc was still overwhelmingly white and didn't address the reality of POC in Britain at all and therefore wasn't something he was particularly drawn to but there's literally no other delving into a comment that was probably the most revealing in the chapter!I’m glad he had a wonderful time, but even as someone who was twenty-one then (and whose retrospective essay about 1995 is quoted in the foreword), I grew weary of being told what bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

The pre-internet Sodom and Gomorrah in which the tabloids began to understand the power of celebrity news before turning it into a culture. There was an attempt at a critical evaluation towards the end of the book but it was a case of too little, too late in what was otherwise a one sided view. As Brooke-Smith observes, it was the ‘mini epoch’ before the mid-1990s economic boom that gave us rave, grunge, Britpop, the YBAs, the supermodels and the indie cinema revolution. 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. uk/landing-page/orion/orion-company-information/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Orion Publishing Group Limited.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. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Center, the two events that bookend the 1990s, give an illusion of coherence to a chaotic and paradoxical decade. He finds room for such phenomena as Kurt Cobain, Jeff Koons, the Gulf War, the Y2K bug, Doom and David Koresh (Britpop gets one paragraph). You will read more here about David Bailey and Michael Caine than Goldie and Tricky; the Beatles loom larger than club culture. As it was focusing on multiple areas of British 1990's culture I would have liked it to have included a section on the 1990's UK comedy scene as I think that was an important part of culture in the UK at that time and it had hit it's peak in 1995 as a result of experiencing an overhaul in the late 80's and early 90's with the rise of the alternative comedy scene.