Books of Note

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... 

But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. 

There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. 

About which I offered: 

"Adele Bertei rips up the history of No Wave and starts again, recentering the women: fearless artists and confrontational performers who put body and psyche on the line. Written with feral elegance and a keen cinematic eye, this mash-up of memoir and cultural history feels like time travel: an entire era of the New York underground brought back to vivid life." 

No New York is out now on Faber & Faber,

Here is Bertei being interviewed by The Quietus's Elizabeth Wiet. 

Another is Daniel Dylan Wray's  Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty: A History of Independent Music in Sheffield 

About which I offered:

"From '70s postpunk through '80s synthpop to ‘90s bleep techno and beyond,  Sheffield has long been the U.K.’s unacknowledged capital for futurist pop.  Finally the city finds the champion it deserves in Daniel Dylan Wray. A rich blend of urban history and music chronicle, Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty tells in vivid detail the story of a place, a people, and a succession of innovative sounds that would change pop again and again."  

Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty is out in early May on White Rabbit 

And there is a third book deserving of your attention: Ben Cardew's Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs

That's out in late April on Jawbone Press

Here's an extract from Space Age Bachelor Pad Music at The Quietus to whet your appetite. 

Goodness me, I almost forgot - I have a book out that isn't called Still In A Dream, or at least, the paperback edition has just come out    

Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s

Still In A Dream - my new book, out in June

 

 

Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. On White Rabbit Books. 

It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's my most personal book and the one I had the most fun writing

The Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Lost Treasure from the Lost Generation: 50 Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Here's a Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

Here's more information / hype in the form of the official White Rabbit catalogue copy: 

Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.

Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.

A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly and lovingly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.

UK pre-order here. 

US edition out January 2027.

Spanish language version due from Caja Negra Editora in Argentina. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

German version from  Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

As is now traditional, there is a dedicated blog for the book, which will include footnotes and bonus material, as well as news about events and so forth. 

"Well you know my name is Simon"

Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. 

As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to early '70s, such that you could throw a stone in my school playground and it would likely bounce off two or three "Simons".

Apparently this is no longer the case, as Stephen reveals: Simon has dropped out of the Top 500 names in the UK for newborns. 

But once upon a time it was a defining Britboy's name. And made even more so by its incredible rarity as a first name in America. So when Mike Myers wanted to show off his command of English idiom and accent with a Saturday Night Live sketch about a little British boy, there was really only one name that the character could have *.

"Draw-rings" - immaculate pronunciation!

"Don't look at my bum! I don't look at your bum! Bum-looker ! Cheeky monkey!"

Didn't realise the theme tune for the sketch is based on this 1974 cartoon series whose existence I have no recollection of... 

*  Actually, there's a probably a few other contender names: Toby. Gary...  

Update 1/19: Stephen Alexander with a Mary Shelley-like fantasy about "the Monstrous Creation of the Fourth Simon"