"PEOPLE who will remain nameless have texted me saying, ‘Am I in the book? Should I be worried?’ I’ve had to text back saying, ‘You should be worried. You’re not in the book.”

Jane Savidge - the book appeared under her previous name of Phill Savidge although Jane transitioned to female just as the book was published  - PR to the stars, the woman who half-seriously claims she accidentally invented Britpop, has written a memoir. It is a lot of fun. One of those wild pop biogs that revels in the excess, the stars, the spats, the drugs, the pettiness, the whole joyous, foolish silliness of music in the 1990s. As you might expect, it contains stories about Suede and Blur and Pulp and Elastica as they all motored into poll position in pop culture, with the odd glimpse in the margins of David Bowie, William Burroughs, Damien Hirst and umm Michael Barrymore.

“There are some stories in there that I’m a bit scared of,” Savidge admits. “The Barrymore story is a bit out there.” Let’s just say it involves Savidge being locked in a disabled toilet cubicle at an exclusive golf club with Barrymore. Drugs are involved.

Then there's the band whose Glasgow hotel room Savidge and her then girlfriend stumble into to find a mountainous amount of an illegal substance on the table does not “due to the lawyer’s advice.”

But, really, this is a pen portrait of another time, a time when the music press mattered, when the prospect of appearing on the cover of the NME was something bands (and their PRs) would sell their mothers for. When Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher were famous enough to appear on the 10 o’Clock News.

“The job of a PR in those days was to get as much attention as possible,” Savidge recalls. “I don’t think anyone thought about overexposure ever in those days.”

Originally from Nottingham, growing up Savidge worked in record shops, played in bands, did a bit of cross-dressing before decamping to London and starting a career in music biz public relations. She worked for a while for Virgin Records in the late 1980s, which meant she got to meet Roy Orbison, but also meant representing bands she didn’t much care for - It Bites; enough said

In 1990 she handed in her notice to become a poet and watch Italia 90. Instead she was poached by John Best to join what would eventually become Savage & Best, PRs to most of the bands who would go on to be labelled Britpop. Mostly, Savidge claims, because she didn’t want to represent American bands and ended up with a roster of groups who “lived round the corner”.

Britpop was a reaction to the American domination of music in the early 1990s. When Select magazine put Suede’s Brett Anderson’s on the cover in front of a superimposed Union flag and the words “Yanks Go Home” (much to Anderson’s displeasure by all accounts), Britpop in all its bumptious glory was born. And Savage & Best were at the heart of it. “We did 14 of the 25 bands that were Britpop,” Savidge points out.

Suede were first among equals for her. “I must admit when I first came across Suede they were my favourite band in the world and I wanted to be in them. I probably wanted to be Brett. So, I went about trying to make him famous as if I was making myself famous although I was hiding behind a curtain too shy to come out.”

This was another time, a time before social media and downloads when the music press was a gateway drug for music fans, and the relationship between PR and journalist was both incestuous and competitive. Reading Lunch with the Wild Frontiers at times reads like a 20th-century glitterball take on Machiavelli’s The Prince.

“Was I Machiavellian?” Savidge asks. “Well, Elastica formed in our office. Melody Maker found out we were doing this band. The singer was going out with Damon. She used to go out with Brett. She was beautiful, she was rich. She looked cool. The band looked amazing.

“They rang up and said, ‘Can we do an Elastica feature?’ I genuinely said, ‘Well, you can do a feature on them if you want, but you must not put them on the cover.’ And, of course, that’s when he put the phone to his belly or whatever and said, ‘Phill Savidge is turning down the cover for Elastica,’ even though they’d never offered me the cover in the first place. They did a feature and they put them on the cover to make me annoyed and to make the band annoyed.”

On the walls of the Savage & Best offices back then there was a list of questions to be considered before taking on any band. They included: “Is the music exciting?” “Any discernible personality?” “Do they look good?” “Do they want to be famous?”

It’s a good reminder that Britpop measured itself in record sales. “I think everybody secretly wanted to be famous and successful, whether they would admit it themselves,” Savidge points out.

“Brett was on my case all the time. ‘I’m not doing it if it’s not a cover. I’m not winking for the cover of i-D, but it still has to be a cover.’

“But I forgive them. They want to be successful in the career they’ve chosen so why not be obsessed with the finer detail of it.”

These days, of course, Britpop is the stuff of nostalgia and Savidge, as well as writing books (there’s another one in the planning) has a different set of clients. “I generally do older bands because I don’t want to be in a spit and sawdust pub every night of my life.”

As for Britpop’s legacy? “I think the term is horrible, but I think some of the music survives. The Suede and Pulp records, the Verve records and Elastica records are fantastic.”

Which just leaves the obvious question, Jane. Blur or Oasis? “Teenage Fanclub.”

Lunch with the Wild Frontiers by Phill Savidge is published by Jawbone Press on Thursday