According to Mr Matt Glasby’s new book Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting To This Is England, while Blur were battling it out with Oasis in the charts and Mr Tony Blair was centre stage in politics, something significant was happening in British cinema.

Mr Glasby contends that a series of films in the 1990s and 2000s were created “that were loosely connected by a sense of style and a sense of shared vision”. Out went the floppy-haired, posh romanticism of Mr Hugh Grant and in came characters that embodied gritty Britpop. “It was a byword for a period of cultural cross-pollination, the like of which the UK had not experienced since the 1960s. It was New-Labour-optimism-meets-New-Lad irony,” says Mr Glasby.

“It pushed boundaries, paid Hollywood little heed and, all too briefly, placed a booming UK film industry at the centre of its own movie universe. We got Shallow Grave; Trainspotting; Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels; Human Traffic; Billy Elliot and Shaun Of The Dead.”

But what, exactly, made it so defining? “It showed, to quote former Film4 head David Aukin, that ‘we could make films for ourselves,’” says Mr Glasby. “For a long time in the 1980s and 1990s – and even to this day – film entertainment in this country meant Hollywood films. But Danny Boyle and co proved… that we could make vibrant, entertaining films with British accents and people would take notice.”

Here are Mr Glasby’s five most iconic moments from Britpop cinema:

Mr Danny Boyle’s Academy Award-nominated 1996 film charts the lives of heroin addicts in a gloomy, economically deprived Edinburgh (though most of it was filmed in Glasgow). Starring Mr Ewan McGregor and Mr Robert Carlyle it was a seminal moment in Britpop cinema - but it’s the opening that Mr Glasby highlights. “Set to Renton’s iconic ‘choose life’ speech and Iggy Pop’s thumping drums, Trainspotting’s opening chase is practically a Britpop Cinema mission statement.” It shone a light on a time, place and area that had previously gone unseen on the silver screen.

Mr Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic takes place over the course of a drug-fuelled weekend in Cardiff, Wales, featuring rave culture, drugs, big tunes and big venues. But perhaps the moment that marks it out above others is when “Britpop Cinema regulars John Simm and Danny Dyer bellow excitedly down the phone at each other to let us know that, finally, the weekend has landed.” Twentysomethings watched it and instantly recognised themselves and their experiences.

Set in northeast England during the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike, Billy Elliot’s iconic scene sees a young Billy (Mr Jamie Bell) dancing out his frustration “like an apoplectic Gene Kelly, kicking against the bricks to The Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’”. The era was different but its sense of place and time was pure Brit cinema.

“Shaun [Mr Simon Pegg] and co pass a suspiciously familiar group of survivors headed by Spaced’s Jessica Hynes. A pop-cultural hat-tip so cocky that you have to love it,” says Mr Glasby. In another scene, Shaun gets particularly miffed when a first pressing of “Blue Monday” by New Order gets used as a weapon in the fight against the zombie horde. It was wry, spry and as dry and British as comedy comes.

The 2006 film by Mr Shane Meadows centres on a group of skinheads in England in 1983. Like Billy Elliot, it relied heavily on iconic music to inform its period setting and sense of place. There is a scene where “Shaun [Mr Thomas Turgoose] and his new pals walk in slow-mo to the sunny strains of Al Barry & The Cimarons, and for a moment it feels like everything might just be OK,” says Mr Glasby.