Excited to announce the publication this summer of Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94. 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 link soon. Also Spanish language version is due from Caja Negra Editora in Argentina. And an Italian version from Minimum Fax.
Awesome! I'll be looking forward to this.
ReplyDeleteGood news!
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to this, as I think this period of music has aged a lot better than I expected it would at the time. Will have to read the sections about Teenage Fanclub and Pavement with gritted teeth, though.
ReplyDeleteI was 12 -22 for the years covered in this book. I would say that was youth. I would've thought you were an old guy when I first encountered you in the pages of Melody Maker in 87. Wouldn't the music of your youth been the ten years prior to those covered in the book. By the time I discovered Sonic Youth around this time in the "Sister" era I thought their name was embarrassing as Kim Gordon would have been 34. Anyway, just being pedantic and we're all too fucking old now.
ReplyDeleteThe world of the UK music press was a realm of unnaturally prolonged adolescence, so I would say I was still a youth right up until.... I was going to say getting married, which was 1992, but even then I lived a life largely unencumbered by adult responsibilities for several more years. "Youth" only really ended when we had our first child at the end of the decade.
DeleteI also had a booster shot of adolescence when I got into the rave scene. Suddenly, aged 28 and upwards, I was doing things that teenagers do. And I'd be rubbing shoulders on dancefloors - sharing bottled water - with people a decade younger than me.
I was going with more of a conventional youth thing... like youth group or was the UK version youth club etc. The internet is saying 12-24 which is stretching it a few too many years but... Yeah proper adult responsibilities didn't kick in for me until my mid 30s. I didn't consider myself a youth or particularly very down with the kids though. Didn't you ever think gee this is a bit weird I'm 30+ hanging out with the kids. It would often be surprising or begrudging when I had to admit I liked Interpol or Animal Collective. I still don't think I'm an adult like say my father was, probably due to the fact we couldn't have children. I'm not big on the generations thing but sometimes the analysis rings true like the saying "Gen Xers were were 30 at 15 and they're still 30 at 50"
ReplyDeleteBeen listening to a bit of mid-80's jangle pop of late, just out of nostalgia - stuff like The Bodines, This Poison!, Razorcuts. It's really noticeable in hindsight that there is a definite moment when everyone switched from trying to copy Johnny Marr to trying to copy Kevin Shields.
ReplyDeleteIt's also quite interesting that the former ended up being productively relatively sterile, while the latter created an entire musical world.
Yeah, there's more shoegaze being made currently than at the time - possibly vastly more. Whereas you don't really hear Marr style playing. You would have heard more people imitating him in the Eighties itself - as you say.
DeleteI used to know the people in The Razorcuts!
Perhaps the entire musical world Marr helped forge, which indirectly helped Shields create his, was indie? I refer not only to the artistic achievements of The Smiths but their financial importance to Rough Trade as a label and a distributor.
DeleteAlso, I agree that it’s interesting that Marr did not have a lasting influence. But I think The Smiths were an unrepeatable efflorescence rooted in a certain time and place—not even Marr himself could build anything substantial from his mid-80s work (aside from an admittedly excellent live show as a solo act).
DeleteEven as a passionate lover of his music, when I heard MBV’s “Soon” I knew the world was very quickly turning the page on him.
One thing that intrigues me is how the Zoomers would react if they ever got to hear pre-Shoegaze jangle pop.
DeleteI feel there's a strong chance they would really, really like it.
Is there an appreciable difference between pre- and post-shoegaze jangle pop? Serious question. I feel like there’s a difference but I can’t put my finger on what it is.
DeleteThe main difference is the almost total absence of effects pedals pre-shoegaze. The emphasis was on getting the cleanest, purest sound possible. This is an emblematic example:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePnJXu8rR9E&list=RDePnJXu8rR9E&start_radio=1
Thanks. I think that makes your point well. So the sound of Orange Juice, then? I can actually hear a difference between this and post-1990 indie stuff all the way into the 2010’s. There is a raw immediacy that later indie pop didn’t have. It became too slick, too polished in its quaint eccentricities. I struggle with bands like (to pick one at random) The New Pornographers because I hear a wealth of talent, brains, and wit in their music, which is often very good, and yet their songs are less exciting to me than the twenty-sixth-best C86 track, which objectively speaking is probably total rubbish. But I don’t know. Distinguishing periods of indie is like trying to define the exact difference between tan and beige.
DeleteAt the time of C86, when music like the Bodines was ubiquitous, it seemed like this was what indie music was destined to sound like forever. Its value was as a kind of purist and parochial opposition to the stadium rock of U2 and Simple Minds, and the slick chart pop of the likes of Deacon Blue or Curiosity Killed The Cat, rather than in any innate qualities.
DeleteIn hindsight, as this period turned out to be so brief, I think a lot of this stuff has a certain charm that is waiting there to be rediscovered. None of it is really "great music", but there is something unique about it that is probably impossible to replicate to day. There's a bit of sociological value there as well, I suspect.
I recall an endless procession of bands being hyped as the "new Smiths" back in the day, but can't recall any "new MBVs".
ReplyDelete