STILL IN A DREAM OUT TOMORROW!!!!! Details of UK Tour, media appearances, 50 Lost Treasures zine, translations, advance praise...

Check out my Instagram Instagram.com/simonreynoldswriter/ for the latest news about Still In A Dream

NEW Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The Quietus

STILL IN A DREAM UK TOUR JUNE 15-20

Monday 15 - London - Rough Trade East 

Location: Old Truman Brewery 91, Brick Ln, London E1 6QL 

Time: doors open 7pm, event starts 8pm on dot

Conversation with Miki Berenyi (Lush / author Fingers Crossed)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing. 

Get tickets here

Tuesday 16 - Bath - Roseberry Road Studios

Location: 25 - 28 Roseberry Road, Bath, Somerset, BA2 3DX 

Time: doors open 7pm

Conversation with Jonathan Wright (journalist and Groovy Times co-founder)

Followed by audience Q+A, book signing and a DJ set from Dave Howell

Get tickets here

Wednesday 17 - Bristol -  Strange Brew

Location: Strange Brew, 10-12 Fairfax St, Bristol BS1 3DB 

Time: 6pm

Conversation with Darran McLaughlin (Bookhaus)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing (books courtesy Bookhaus).

Get tickets here

  

Thursday 18 - London  - IMCP The Long Play Sessions,

Location: The Venue, ICMP (Queens Park Campus), NW6 6PA 

Time: 7pm 

Conversation with Rudy Tambala (A.R. Kane)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing

Get tickets here

Friday 19 - Leeds - Waterstones 

Location: 93-97 Albion St, Leeds LS1 5AP 

Time: 7pm

In conversation with David Hesmondhalgh (Leeds University / author Why Music Matters)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing.  

Get tickets here

Saturday 20 - Brighton - Resident

Location: 27 - 28 Kensington Gardens, North Laine, Brighton, BN1 4AL 

Time: doors open 6.15 pm, event starts 6.45 on dot

Conversation with Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins / Bella Union) 

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing  

Get tickets here

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, PODCASTS, AND OTHER MEDIA APPEARANCES, PLUS  ARTICLES BY ME RELATED TO THE BOOK

Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The Quietus

Shoegaze Special for Zakia's Sewell's Welcome To Dream Time, BBC 6 Music - June 14 10pm-midnight on 6 Music

Very nice review from Ngaire Ruth at Louder Than War 

Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The Quietus

Rock's Back Pages podcast (imminent)

Excerpt from Still In A Dream at The Wire website (imminent)

interview with Robert Quinn / Wasteland Receiver (Resonance FM) (imminent)

Essay for Vice's "Self-Destruction" issue - on the oblivion-thru-obliteration aesthetic of narcotic neo-psych bands like Spacemen 3 and other late '80s bliss-rockers. (imminent)

To Here Knows When podcast - excellent chat with Paul McDermott 

Word In Your Ear podcast - a really fun conversation with Mark Ellen and David Hepworth - Word In Your Ear podcast -  the episode with me now available on Apple   and YouTube

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

Still In A Dream YouTube playlist

                                                    

UK edition published June 18 by White Rabbit Books - pre-order. US edition Jan 2027.

FIFTY LOST TREASURES bonus zine

For the U.K. only, the Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Fifty Lost Treasures dedicated to "lost treasure from the lost generation", artists not covered or only glancingly mentioned in the book.  

You can get it here at Gnostic Sonics or here at Resident or here at Stranger Than Paradise or here at Norman Records

TRANSLATIONS

German version from Ventil Verlag. November 2026

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

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

Turkish version from Ayrinti. Date TBA

PRAISE FOR STILL IN A DREAM

"His writing is passionate. . .  it's a thrill ride. If you weren't there, you'll wish you had been" - Uncut

"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

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynolds'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

'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 - my new book, out June 18

 

"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

"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

'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

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.

Rough Trade Special Offer - pre-order here

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. 

Apropos of nothing

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. 

The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! 

Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly I was an early adopter.

Now one of the things that always mystified me back then was this idea that taking pop seriously was some sort of radically new gesture, a daring step forward into Enlightenment, leaving behind the Bad Old Days when Rockism had our minds in chains.

It always felt like a myth, this idea that before the pro-pop insurgency of the 2000s, music journalists universally treated pop with disdain; that there was never any enthusiasm or respect for artists operating in the commercial mainstream, no serious discussion of chartpop. 

I don't think this was even true in America, where generalism had long been a fairly established mode. But I know for sure that in the U.K. it was an utterly commonplace occurrence. For certain writers, it was a shtick, a specialist territory they set themselves up in. For others, it would be part of having a well-rounded approach to being both a fan/consumer and a commentator/thinker. 

So let's take a little journey into the Not-So-Dark Ages before poptimism came along to sort everything out. 

In the Nineties, on the UK music press, you often had people writing excited pieces about R&B, or all that Eurobeat pop-dance (Snap, etc). Sometimes, admittedly, with a contrarian, look-at-me aspect, to them. But the reason that that was irritating, from my point of view, was because there was absolutely nothing audaciously against-the-grain about taking a pro-pop position - either with specific instances of pop or the entire field. That  move was already well established, had an extensive history...



In the Eighties, New Pop emerged right at the start of the decade. There were two ideas here: that 

A/ it was cool and valid to "go pop" (the move made by ABC, Scritti Politti, New Order, Style Council, et al), and that

 B/ pop already contained great stuff  (all the glorious disco-funk of the era, for starters, but also things like Dollar, the mascot group for New Pop ideologues, the Annie/Robyn of their day ... You would even get writers sticking up for Bucks Fizz). 

New Pop thinking was virtually hegemonic on the rock press for some years, although it's true that the readership was not as taken with it as the writers. It's worth recalling that the term  "rockism" itself was coined in 1980, by Pete Wylie of Wah!, as a sort of auto-critique from within postpunk rock culture. It was propagated energetically by Paul Morley and others, and rapidly became the mindset of perhaps a score or more critics working on the rock weeklies and the new style magazines (where anti-rockism became dogma).  (I won't bring Smash Hits into the discussion - its only innovation was that arch, taking-nothing-too-seriously mode). 

NME's Richard Cook with a rave review for ABBA's best-of (1982)

But in the second half of the Eighties, even when there was a backlash within the rock weeklies and the post-postpunk scene against pop gloss -  a return to indie / underground values, to harder-darker and more abrasive music - the pro-pop move remained a stock critical maneuver. I remember colleagues speaking up for Aha, or Curiosity Killed the Cat, or Mel & Kim...  Pet Shop Boys were widely lauded... Everyone liked Janet Jackson...   I'm sure I made that move a few times myself. 

As for black music, it was very much on the inkie weeklies menu  - hip hop, funk, reggae, a bit of R&B, some jazz... African music in quite a big way. Even Sounds covered reggae regularly and surprisingly thoroughly, given its image as an Oi! / heavy metal paper..

In the Seventies - the period that you'd probably imagine to be the absolute darkest age of rockism - the UK music press was actually catholic and remarkably comprehensive in its coverage. The weeklies conceived of themselves as music newspapers (Melody Maker, in the early 70s, was based in Fleet Street) with an interest (in both senses of the word) in reporting and analysing everything. It was their job. So Melody Maker - according to received wisdom the "progressive paper" - would routinely cover things like Osmondmania, David Cassidy, the Jackson Five, Isaac Hayes, early disco, etc, with depth, intelligence, and respect - alongside all the things you'd expect (Hatfield and the North, Steeleye Span,  Nucleus). One week, there'd be a centre spread on Stockhausen or Sun Ra; the next a 4000 word investigation into the top producers of teenybop, or a report on the new boom for fan clubs. 

Oh look, this has just popped up at Rock's Back Pages - the late Colin Irwin, who did the folk column in Melody Maker, does a report on the funk scene at clubs like Lacy Lady and with deejays like Chris Hill (RIP). This is in 1976, three or four full years before Danny Baker would make much rhetorical hay at NME out of how the true working class Britfunk scene isn't A Certain Ratio / Gang of Four but the jazz-funk scene with its All-Dayers and Weekenders as hosted by Hill and other jocks. 

Both NME and Melody Maker reported on Northern Soul - Sounds I'm almost certain did too. "If it moves, cover it".

MM's Richard Williams wrote circa 1976 one of the most perceptive pieces about dub reggae and its revolutionary implications. 

There were also individual writers who -  as the Richard Williams Melody Maker rave review of Gary Glitter below shows -   would sometimes put forth the against-the-grain arguments so familiar to us from the poptimistic kerfuffle of the 2000s.  

The NME was just as expansive: even during the sombre height of postpunk, they'd run cover stories on Michael Jackson and Giorgio Moroder, big features on Earth Wind and Fire and Chic...  as mentioned Danny Baker's enthused reports on the UK's burgeoning jazz-funk scene... passionate and informed coverage of reggae from roots 'n' dub to lover's rock ...  an appreciation of Abba... 

I'm not so familiar with the US rock press of the 1970s but I have seen a fair few issues of Creem, and in there you will find writers making arguments celebrating, say, The Sweet, in terms of pure pop excitement, brilliantly effective if  manufactured thrills, etc.  

In the Sixties... well, rock criticism is nascent and unformed at that point, so I'm not sure there's a rock/pop divide clearly marked such that people could dramatise themselves around it. People tended to use 'rock' and 'pop' interchangeably.  

Still, there is an argument  for seeing Nik Cohn as the Original Poptimist, albeit a gloomy one in so far as he thinks Pop's energy flash and pulp heroics have been stifled by the pompous self-seriousness of Rock. 

It is notable that the first two major youth-music books by British writers both use the word "pop" in their titles: Cohn's Pop From the Beginning, and George Melly's Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts. Also worth noting, as regards differences between the UK and the USA: Cohn's book was retitled for the American market as Rock From the Beginning. 

Perhaps the battle the poptimists keep on fighting is a America-specific problem that regenerates itself perennially;  whereas the battle never needed to be fought in the U.K. in so far as pop has historically not - most of the time -  been a dirty word, a synonym for phony and fabricated - at least for most sensible people. 

So, essentially, the pro-pop approach - in both its attention-seeking mode and conscientious fair-minded generalist mode - has a history going back over fifty years, at least - possibly longer.  

It's easy to see why the notion of a Dark Ages would be appealing, should you fancy seeing yourself - or  being seen - as a light-bringer, someone on the side of Right: boldly rectifying longstanding injustices, and breaking new intellectual ground in the process too ...  

But this narrative is, to a startling degree, a myth. 

Williams making the "don't knock the greasy kids's stuff" move - and even in '72, far from the first to do it.

the trash aesthete move - Glitter can't be denied "except by impossible snobs who lack any real feeling for rubbish"

"he does it to those kids in just the way they want it done" is unfortunate language, with hindsight... 

Prototype Thoughts on Melody Maker (late 60s / early 70s incarnation) as the Original Poptimist Paper (or at least, the Original Generalist Paper). The key general point is this, which possibly explains the rise of poptimism at the start of the 2000s as a response to a narrowing of focus in the UK music press (coupled also with the rise of a Pitchfork in its then indie-ist form): 

... By the mid-90s, music magazine publishing had fragmented so much that this kind of catholic comprehensiveness was no longer tenable. When the music weeklies didn't have hardly any rivals, they could cover rock but also its adjacent genres - soul, dance, etc. But as time went by they got less and less benefit from these attempts at being comprehensive. Their core readership wasn't interested, or was actively turned off; meanwhile, the genre-ist fans gravitated towards the the genre-ist magazines.

....It's considered righteous for people to criticise NME.... or the early, pre-reformed Pitchfork for their failures to cover certain genres, or when they did cover them, lambast them for doing it in a tokenistic way, or for imposing their own rockist biases. Failing to "understand them on their own terms".... 

But you never got hordes of rocktimists railing against The Source or Vibe for their failure to cover Queens of the Stone Age or Arcade Fire, did you?    Nobody ever expected Smash Hits to take on Terrorizer or The Wire type music. No one thinks less of Mixmag and DJ for their lack of "engagement" with indie.  Did Blues and Soul ever put MBV on its front cover, like MM put Bobby Brown on its?...  

It was totally fine for all those magazines to base their coverage on calculations about what their market was, what their readership was interested in.  Yet the accusation of incomplete catholicity always get leveled at the rock magazines. The onus is on rock criticism.