Four music books chart unconventional lives in the industry
1975: The Year the World Forgot
, by Dylan Jones (Constable, £25).
This generation of music acts, which included the likes of Genesis, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and Queen, was who punk rock would fight against. It aimed to replace their mature, erudite music with pared-back, stripped-down, revved-up pop songs.
Jones, a prolific chronicler of pop music and the people who created it, is refuting the perception of pre-1976 being the preserve of prog rock bands such as Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 1975 was the paragon of adult pop, he writes. A year rich with masterpieces such as Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan), Young Americans (David Bowie), Horses (Patti Smith), The Köln Concert (Keith Jarrett), Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Another Green World (Brian Eno), and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Joni Mitchell).
Across 21 albums, Jones smartly covers the songs and music as well as the geocultural milieu that nurtured and enveloped them. An excellent book that, thoughtfully, closes with a '75 from '75' playlist you can listen to on Spotify.
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Eamon Carr: 'I found the cumulative effect of the horror stories I was reporting on from the North difficult to shake off.' Photograph: Eric Luke
Pure Gold: Memorable Conversations with Remarkable People
, by Eamon Carr (Merrion Press, €16.99), contains recollections of a different but no less important time, when journalists could interview people without the presence of PRs and their clipboards.
Pure Gold gathers a series of interviews (culled from an assortment of mislaid cassette tapes) that Carr, a former member of Horslips and a long-established journalist, conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a motley crew of people. The list is as impressive as it is eclectic: Eartha Kitt, JP Dunleavy, Josephine Hart, Brenda Fricker, Shane MacGowan, Rudolf Nureyev, Jack Charlton, 'Mad' Frankie Fraser, John Mortimer and more.
The collection is much more than a conversation between two people or, God forbid, a set of predictable questions that too often receive rote responses. As well as insightfully deconstructing the interview process, Carr has a knack for going off-piste, judging the mood of the interviewee and burrowing down as far as possible.
Earnest indie rock bands, he writes, answered questions with quotes that 'were homogenous, interchangeable'. Not so the interviewees here, who pounced on Carr's puckish, innate curiosity with a speed that less engaged inquisitors can only dream of.
Keith Donald has played with The Pogues, Van Morrison and Ronnie Drew.
There is enough of a life story in
Music and Mayhem
, by Keith Donald (Lilliput Press, €18.95) to fill in many hours of questions and answers, but the meat, so to speak, is in the reading. The career musician, now in his 80s, is best known, perhaps, for being a member of the groundbreaking ensemble group, Moving Hearts. Donald's peaks and troughs in life are documented with assured pragmatism.
'My days are numbered' is the kind of first chapter opening sentence that sets the scene for what follows (spoiler: it isn't pretty). From trusted boundaries being broken to grasping an instinctive love of music, from being diagnosed with lifelong PTSD to embarking on, writes Donald, 'a thirty-year internal battle between attraction and revulsion, emotionally up when the drink kicked in, down when it wasn't available, the rollercoaster of addiction'.
Music courses through the book, needless to say, but the 'mayhem' of the title runs it a close second, and often the two are locked in a battle for supremacy. Stitched into the fabric of each is a distinctive history of Ireland's fledgling music industry. It is one populated by showbands ('human gramophones that rehearsed and learned three new songs every week'), Moving Hearts ('unlike any band I'd played with') and shoals of business sharks and redemption. A life lived? You bet.
One could say the same for US rapper Tupac Shakur (1971-1996), who is regarded not only as one of hip-hop's most influential figures but also, through his music and activism, a torchbearer for highlighting political injustice and the marginalisation of African Americans.
Late rapper Tupac Shakur was shot aged 25 in 1996 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Photograph: Al Pereira/MichaelWith the primary motivation of presenting hip-hop's most noted nonconformist,
Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur
, by Dean Van Nguyen (White Rabbit, £25), maintains a firm balance between placing Shakur within the context of the Black Panther movement (both of his parents were party members) and avoiding the usual biographical cliches of hero worship or downgrading unsavoury aspects of the subject's life (including a conviction in 1994 for sexual abuse).
There is also much to admire about Van Nguyen's industrious, thought-provoking research, oral histories and thorough critical analysis of Shakur's significance. Those looking for a strictly linear approach will be disappointed, but anyone (Shakur fans or not) interested in hip-hop history and Black radical political ideology will, with some justification, love it.
Dean Van Nguyen places Tupac Shakur within the context of the Black Panther movement. Photograph: Daragh Soden
Another unconventional life is outlined in
The Absence: The Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer,
by Budgie, aka Peter Clarke (White Rabbit, £25). Merseyside-born Budgie studied art in nearby Liverpool, where in the mid-1970s he joined fledgling punk bands the Spitfire Boys and Big in Japan.
He is best known, however, as the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees, which he joined in 1979 until their dissolution in 1996. Afterwards, he and Siouxsie (with whom he was romantically attached) formed The Creatures. Following their divorce in 2007, Budgie continued in music. His most recent work was a 2023 collaborative album with former Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst and Irish musician/producer Jacknife Lee.
English Punk and New Wave musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie feature in the Creatures' Right Now music video. Photograph:The Absence, however, is anything but an orderly trawl through back pages. Rather, it is an evocative, lyrical memoir of boyhood; from 'on the walk back to the guesthouse along the Golden Mile, my dad and I would stop to buy a takeaway of fish and chips' to remembering after-show hangers-on 'Siouxsie might play along… almost as a game, but most times she would get irritated, snap, and tell them to f*** off'. He also reflects on a doomed marriage: 'Our intense love was real, as was our intense anger and disgust'.
A bold, bracing retelling of Goth beginnings and unhappy endings.
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I don't want to mire this article in tedious pedantry about a TV show's shooting locations, not least since much was made of it when the show debuted last week, but it is unavoidably comic to witness establishing shots of Yorkshire's urban exteriors cut directly to the pristine streets of Ranelagh or Rathmines. Things entered an even more discombobulating realm in this week's episodes when we discover that Young Alison subsequently moved to actual Dublin to work in a pub in Temple Bar. Having journeyed there to find her, Young Dan spots her in a tryst with another man and takes an emotional moment on the Ha'penny Bridge. At that point, action cuts abruptly to his older self back in Sheffield, a juxtaposition which may have carried more declarative oomph were it not very clearly filmed 20 minutes' walk from said bridge, at the Dean Hotel on Harcourt Street. [ The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch Opens in new window ] All such quibbles aside, it's quite watchable in an emotional, tear-jerky way, even if its plodding pace didn't raise my heartbeat too often. The soundtrack is certainly great, but the show chooses to presume as fact, rather than demonstrate how or why, the music they fell in love with was earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly important. The paper-thin characterisations of our heroes' respective partners also seem explicitly geared toward giving us, the audience, license to let said spouses be discarded like decrepit band merch. 'You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape,' Alison tells her daughter in a car ride, which is a neat summation of the show's themes of love and art transcending time and distance. It does, however, seem like resolutely useless advice to give a 16-year-old girl, since the curation of mix tapes should be as relatable to a teenager as talk of whale oil lamps or penny farthing maintenance. Perhaps kids were still doing this in 2015. It's all so long ago, I can't quite remember. Trekking further into olden times, we find period murder mystery Bookish (U&Alibi) – or, rather, I found it, but you may still need directions. That's because Mark Gatiss (co-creator of the BBC's Benedict Cumberbatch-minting blockbuster, Sherlock) has returned to crime with this caperish series for U&Alibi, a channel with such an impressively prolix history of rebrands, I'll offer a brief summary for the uninformed. Originally launched as UK Arena in 1997, it was then renamed UK Drama, then UKTV Drama, then Alibi and, as of last November, the gloriously inscrutable 'U&Alibi'. Since the fourth of those five brandings, the channel has focused solely on crime, mostly British-made listings-fillers culled from the yellowing pages of decades-old copies of the Radio Times. Bookish, created, co-written and starring Gatiss, is one of the few full originals they've produced, and its premise seems curiously familiar; in period London, eccentric bookseller Gabriel Book – it's that kind of show – supplements his day job by solving murders alongside his wife, Trottie. He bears a letter from Churchill that grants him license to step into crime scenes and intrude on interrogations, in the manner of some sort of London-based amateur genius sleuth who works with the constabulary – a scenario I'm sure has some form of literary precedent I can't quite put my finger on. The action takes place in 1946, rather than the Victorian era, although you may never quite banish the whiff of Baker Street from your nostrils while watching. [ What does the future hold for popular BBC show Masterchef? Opens in new window ] Gatiss is capable as ever in the lead, waspish and arch without quite tipping over into panto territory, and thankfully given more interiority to work with as the show goes on. The script is sharp and Bookish doles out its soft-scoop mysteries with a restraint that's admirable, if occasionally frustrating. Fans of Gatiss's work with League of Gentlemen or his Ghost Stories For Christmas may sometimes wish, as I did, for something a little nastier than the cosier-than-thou fare on offer here. This is, for the most part, glacially gentle programming, albeit suffused with just enough quirk, charm and subliminal darkness, to raise it above the duvet-lined trenches of, say, Death in Paradise, or – God forbid – the treacly, incident-averse morass of Heartbeat. For all its tropey trappings, Bookish is more cleverly written, and a good deal more handsomely mounted, than you might expect from a channel that sounds like a wifi password. U&Alibi may have just cracked the riddle of combining cosiness, craft and class. Turns out the answer was hiring Mark Gatiss, but you needn't be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.
