Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness 1991-1998

From Liam Gallagher's spit to Bjork Gudmundsdottir's polish, from the murky beginnings of Britpop to the grisly end of Kurt Cobain, and from the back of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's minibus to the top of a jungle pirate's Bethnal Green towerblock, Ben Thompson celebrates the whole fractured, glorious, idiosyncratic spectrum of turn-of-the-century pop life. Whether taking tea and toast with Beth Gibbons of Portishead, or headache tablets in a St John's Ambulance room with Damon and Graham from Blur, Seven Years of Plenty throws off the shackles of cynicism, self-aggrandizement and futile categorization that hobble so many contemporary pop writing to provide as unique and impassioned a survey of music in the nineties as Lester Bangs did for the seventies.