"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'"
- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect
'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'
- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer
‘The alternative guitar rock of the late 80s was imaginative, expansive, experimental, and ultimately - and perhaps unexpectedly - proved to have a lasting impact on the way pop sounds in the 21st Century. Simon Reynolds was there, filing dispatches from rock's cutting edge: part-memoir of a lost world of music journalism, part critical analysis, Still In A Dream brings an important and exhilarating era vividly to life’
- Alexis Petridis, The Guardian
"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynold's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity"
- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror
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: Fifty Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.
UK pre-order here.
US edition out January 2027.
Spanish language version due from Caja Negra Editora. Date TBA.
Italian version from Minimum Fax. Date TBA.
German version from Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.
French version from Audimat. Date TBA.
Turkish edition from Ayrıntı. Date TBA
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.
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.
