Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James (of Blur) and Louise Wener (of Sleeper) have written books of their own too. Miranda Sawyer’s Uncommon People, which was dashed off in ‘four months flat’ with recourse to the author’s journalism from the 1990s, is styled as a literary ‘mixtape’. Each chapter centres on one notable song: for instance, The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ or Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’. Radiohead is represented by a song whose title sums up the book: ‘No Surprises’.

About the timeline, Sawyer is confident. ‘Let’s decide’, she writes, ‘that the years between … April 1993 … and August 1997, when Oasis released Be Here Now, are the years that we are discussing.’ Her starting point is the issue of Select magazine which is often identified as marking the movement’s birth. The cover featured a shot of Anderson in front of a Union Jack (the flag was added after the picture was taken, much to his chagrin) and the headline was a riposte to the dominance in the UK of American music, especially grunge: ‘Yanks Go Home’. The question of what qualifies as Britpop is muddier. The word is synonymous with retro-tinged, broadly Anglophile anthems (‘Parklife’, ‘Wonderwall’, Supergrass’s ‘Alright’). This would appear to disqualify the swamp-folk-rock of P J Harvey and the spiralling dance epics of Underworld, though both are allotted chapters here, as is the Northern Irish teen-power outfit Ash, despite Sawyer maintaining they ‘could never truly be Britpop’. Edwyn Collins, the ex-frontman of the 1980s band Orange Juice, who had a 1995 comeback hit with ‘A Girl Like You’, is here, too, even though Sawyer more or less accepts his claim that he had ‘nothing to do with Britpop’. That ‘Beyond’ in the book’s subtitle ends up doing a lot of work.

Whatever the parameters, there is no disputing that Sawyer was there. She worked at Select magazine when the Britpop issue hit the newsstands. At the effervescent pop weekly Smash Hits, of which Neil Tennant (one half of the Pet Shop Boys) was once assistant editor, she socialised with the staff