The pre-internet Sodom and Gomorrah in which the tabloids began to understand the power of celebrity news before turning it into a culture. 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.

Additionally I don't think the overall view of the book was balanced, it is heavily focused around the interviews from the main cultural players of the 1990's and as a result it is a biased overview, the book would have benefited from some interviews with those who were not so successful. Jones was a senior editor at the Sunday Times Magazine in 1995 and seems to have hung out with all of his interviewees, making the interstitial passages a kind of stealth memoir about his adventures with the glitterati. 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.p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice.

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. The year 1995, you could argue, was more about consolidation than innovation, with hungry outsiders becoming the new status quo. 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. Before reading I thought the book was primarily focused on the music industry (and the blurb seems to mainly point to this being the case) but instead it is heavily focused on multiple aspects of 90's culture such as politics, art, drugs, journalism and football.You will read more here about David Bailey and Michael Caine than Goldie and Tricky; the Beatles loom larger than club culture. He spent the next decade working in newspapers - principally the Observer and the Sunday Times - before embarking on a multi-award-winning tenure at GQ.