There are a surprising number of books on or by Sonic Youth, the most important of the East Coast bands to emerge in the wake of the first wave of US punk (1974-78). An excellent Spanish biography and an Italian potted history precede the three English language bios to date, while Thurston Moore’s ex-wife Kim
Between 2007-9, Bob Dylan compiled no fewer than 100 Theme Time Radio Hour broadcasts of songs he rated, prefaced by seemingly off-the-cuff verbal riffs on their meaning, history and importance. He was no natural DJ, but his love for the form shone through, as did a well-honed gruff ol’ man persona. The series was produced
As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition’ I say, count me in. It’s a challenging subject, not often trodden with aplomb. I wasn’t even dissuaded when the first line on the inner jacket —
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with her creativity undimmed — like that other postwar English exile P.G. Wodehouse — her afterlife has reaffirmed the old maxim ‘Now that I’m dead I’m finally making a living’. Her collected short stories (as grotesquely
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I found myself arguing with Linda Thompson about the merits of Nick Drake’s music compared with her own and her ex-husband Richard Thompson’s. She suggested Nick’s had a quality that was missing in the work she
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In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re celebrating the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan. My guests are the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, and Clinton Heylin, the Dylanologist’s Dylanologist and author most recently of The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless Hungry Feeling 1941-66. I ask what makes Dylan special, whether what he does
Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the first 170 pages I remained convinced she should have taken a leaf from John Cleland and called it Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. For hers has been an extraordinary life (or perhaps half life,
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was certainly a life that mattered, but it was lived at a time when black lives mattered not a jot to white America. The circumstances of his death in 1938, at the age of 27 (he
Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire, and a quarter of which grew up in Salford, a city in its own right, full of fans of a famous football club equally confused about its true home. This combustible combo was Joy Division
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon (reproduced right). It is both flattering and enigmatic, which is entirely appropriate, given its contents. Half of Simon’s features are lost in a shadow cast across his face — again, entirely appropriate, as Simon wrestled
After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s passion — I am none the wiser as to why folk song collectors assumed that a man singing in a pub for free drinks in, say, 1890 or 1920 was de facto a folk singer?
There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so obviously ill-conceived as The Show That Never Ends, which comes complete with hyperbolic blurb from the esteemed novelist Michael Chabon. Yet what David Weigel provides is a masterclass in how not to write non-fiction. To
The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub- genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’
