books about music worth reading

[madhair60]

I just read a book about Radio 1 which I quite enjoyed and was wondering which other music based books are worth a read. I also read Confess by Rob Halford which I thought was outstanding. Just a general broad "good music books" chat I suppose.

[BJBMK2]

The Last Party - John Harris's book about Britpop, is worth a read. Very compelling overview of the whole story, and does a good job too in terms of dispelling a lot of myths (particularly when it comes to Oasis).

I Want My MTV - Oral history of the first ten years of MTV. Enough stories of 80's coke fuelled abandon to keep one interested.

Reach For The Stars - This is a recent one, it's another oral history, all about the UK pop scene from the late 90's to the late 00's (so that's Spice Girls, roughly going up to the first season of X Factor). Fascinating look into music industry shenanigans and goings on.

Retromania - A Simon Reynolds joint, all about the music industry's general obsession with nostalgia and looking backwards, makes a compelling argument about it essentially ruining everything and stopping all history.

Those are some general music scene ones. If your after stuff about individual artists, you can do no worse then Revolution In The Head (ultimate Beatles tome, and if your feeling brave, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, which does what it says on the tin). The Big Midweek (Steve Hanleys fucking hilarious account of life in The Fall). Beastie Boys Book (It's about...well...what do you reckon? Get the hardback edition with all the lovely colour photos if you can). 3862 Days (Blur's official biog, only goes up to 1999, so you don't get the messy story of Graham leaving, but it's very well written, and surprisingly open for an officially commissioned work).

[Sebastian Cobb]

I read PP Arnold's autobiography, Soul Survivor, not so long ago and thought it was a great read.

The mention of The Last Party reminds me I intended to read The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize, I'm told it's pretty interesting up until the Oasis/Sony stuff.

I also keep meaning to read the Jerry Wexler one as well. Although a quick squint at the reviews has someone calling him a crook and reccomending this instead which does sound pretty interesting.

"I don't know where he's buried, but if I did I'd piss on his grave." —Jerry Wexler, best friend and mentor

Here Comes the Night: Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues is both a definitive account of the New York rhythm and blues world of the early '60s, and the harrowing, ultimately tragic story of songwriter and record producer Bert Berns, whose meteoric career was fueled by his pending doom. His heart damaged by rheumatic fever as a youth, doctors told Berns he would not live to see twenty–one. Although his name is little remembered today, Berns worked alongside all the greats of the era—Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, anyone who was anyone in New York rhythm and blues. In seven quick years, he went from nobody to the top of the pops—producer of monumental R&B classics, songwriter of "Twist and Shout," "My Girl Sloopy" and others.

His fury to succeed led Berns to use his Mafia associations to muscle Atlantic Records out of a partnership and intimidate new talents like Neil Diamond and Van Morrison he signed to his record label, only to drop dead of a long expected fatal heart attack, just when he was seeing his grandest plans and life's ambitions frustrated and foiled.#

edit: ordered the above

[lankyguy95]

Reach For The Stars - This is a recent one, it's another oral history, all about the UK pop scene from the late 90's to the late 00's (so that's Spice Girls, roughly going up to the first season of X Factor). Fascinating look into music industry shenanigans and goings on.

Yeah, this is an excellent tracking of UK pop during my childhood. I blitzed through it.

[bobloblaw]

Cracking big sweeping tomes:

Bob Stanley's Yeah, Yeah, Yeah is a great sprint through pop history, with an unashamed bias towards capital P-pop.
Dorian Lynskey's 33 Revolutions Per Minute is terrific on protest music in all its forms.

as for individual artists...

Viv Albertine's Clothes x3, Boys x 3, Music x 3
Warren Ellis' Nina Simone's Gum
Jarvis Cocker's Good Pop, Bad Pop
Mark Everett's Things The Grandchildren Should Know

... are all worth a read, pretty much irrespective of how much you're into the artist

[Pink Gregory]

see also the already mentioned Simon Reynolds' Rip it Up and Start Again on Post-punk and New Wave

[sweeper]

Also Simon Reynolds - Shock and Awe, on Glam and its legacy. He's written quite a few good books.

I've been dipping into Garry Mulholland's This Is Uncool - the 500 greatest singles since punk and disco. It's about 20 years old, but I can't imagine that much would have changed in this book in the interim. He's often completely wrong (about the merits of Adam Ant, for example) but it's still a fun read.

Another shout for Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah.

And Neil Kulkarni's Periodic Table of Hip Hop - far better and more passionately reasoned than you might expect from this stocking-filler thing.

[Norton Canes]

I've been dipping into Garry Mulholland's This Is Uncool - the 500 greatest singles since punk and disco. It's about 20 years old, but I can't imagine that much would have changed in this book in the interim. He's often completely wrong (about the merits of Adam Ant, for example) but it's still a fun read

It's fantastic stuff, one of my favourite music books. The follow-up, Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco loses a bit by not being as focussed on individual songs, but it's still excellent. Shame there isn't a volume collecting Mulholland's prose. I always look out for his reviews in the Select scans @daf links to in the BBC Four Top of the Pops repeats thread.

[sweeper]

It's fantastic stuff, one of my favourite music books. The follow-up, Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco loses a bit by not being as focussed on individual songs, but it's still excellent. Shame there isn't a volume collecting Mulholland's prose. I always look out for his reviews in the Select scans @daf links to in the BBC Four Top of the Pops repeats thread.

I have it and it's good but he just doesn't seem as excited by the LP than he does by the single, which is completely correct of course.

[The Mollusk]

You don't read music you listen to it!

[FeederFan500]

*cowers in fear*

I quite liked Maconie's book about 50 pop songs adapted from his radio show, The People's Songs.

[iamcoop]

Punk Rock - An Oral History by forum favourite John Robb. Probably the best book I've read on the first wave of U.K. punk aside from;

Englands Dreaming - Jon Savage. Correctly hailed as a classic music book irrespective of genre. My only issue is he's chosen completely ignore the presence of The Stranglers in any shape or form, due to an (understandable) grudge he holds after getting smacked in the mouth by JJ Burnel after giving No More Heroes a bad review. Still, pretty odd to write about the punk era and pretend they didn't exist.

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story - Nick Tosches. Simply one of the most insane music biographies I have ever read.

Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter. Hugely enjoyable memoir of a wannabe hair metal musician, that describes in hilariously painful detail a dream being immediately snuffed out when grunge hits.

Hold tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Fantastic read, especially if you like Grime, but I'd imagine you could find lots to like even if you didn't.

Lords of Chaos - Didrik Søderlind and Michael Moynihan. Now infamous book about the Norwegian Black Metal scene and the shenanigans that happened surrounding it. Lots of very entertaining passages where stupid people try and sound really cool. Tons of nonsense but very entertaining.

Bad Vibes - Luke Haines. The Auteurs front man entertainingly dissects britpop and slates pretty much everyone imaginable. Funny as fuck. I'm convinced this is where the Gibbons brothers took the inspiration of only calling Lynne "my assistant" in the Partridge books, as Haines refers to the cello player from his band as "that fucking cello player" for the entirety of the book.

Should probably list some written by people that aren't men as well, which I will do when I get home from work.

[sardines]

As a teenager diving headfirst into a deep love of music, I felt the same way about Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs as people do when they first read Fear and Loathing or On The Road. Don't know though how well it stands up today. On a similar note Julian Cope's writing (both  Kraut and Jap-rocksampler) managed to make a lot of the music sound more interesting than it probably is.

More recently Harry Sword's Monolithic Undertow is a surprisingly light read and excellent primer on a number of interesting periods/scenes in music. I keep hoping to find a list of every album covered as it'd make for a great record collection.

[Sebastian Cobb]

You don't read music you listen to it!

tell that to the orchestra!

[studpuppet]

You don't read music you listen to it!

My bookshelf seems to back this up - quite a few books on music, but they seem to be mostly inventories or list books.

Ones not mentioned above that I'd recommend to people:

Recording The Beatles by Ryan & Kehew
The Fallen by Dave Simpson (The Fall)
Any Day Now: Bowie The London Years 1947-74 by Kevin Cann
Ginger Geezer by Lucien Randall & Chris Welsh (Viv Stanshall)
The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music ed. Colin Larkin - this is like Revolution In The Head, in that it was written in the pre-internet days, and lots of the entries are quite opinionated - you have the choice of the single volume, or the six-volume library edition.

Books on the shelf that I haven't read yet (but got recommended to me):

Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life Of Tiny Tim by Alanna Wray McDonald and Justin A. Martel
Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime by Dan Hancox
Relax Baby Be Cool by Jeremy Allen (Serge Gainsbourg)
Letters To Gil by Malik Al Nasir (Scott!! Heron!!!)

Edited to add Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 by Michael Azerrad. Must have got that off LibGen...

[Kankurette]

Wondrous Place by Paul du Noyer, about Liverpool music over the years. Revolution in the Head is a rundown of every Beatles song but is very technical and can be a bit dry at times (and I like Helter Skelter, Ian McDonald can stfu).

Two of my favourites are Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein and Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi, from Sleater-Kinney and Lush respectively. Avoid Bit of a Blur by Alex James. If you didn't already hate him, you will by the time you've finished.

[iamcoop]

Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson is also great, but it ends just as Suede are about to get big so probably best avoided if you're looking for a Suede-heavy book, but he's got fantastic writing chops and it's just a great memoir by someone that had an interesting upbringing. I'm cigs about Suede but I absolutely adored this. 

[Agent Dunham]

Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio by James Young, her (and John Cale's) keyboard player for the latter part of her life. Entertaining look at life on the road with a legend with a penchant for heroin.

The Rise and Fall Of Popular Music by Donald Clarke is a broad history of western popular music for the last 200 years, although mainly the last century. Aside from the music itself, he talks about how the industry, the musicians unions and collection agencies, radio advertisers, etc, end up influencing the direction of music.

[sweeper]

Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson is also great, but it ends just as Suede are about to get big so probably best avoided if you're looking for a Suede-heavy book, but he's got fantastic writing chops and it's just a great memoir by someone that had an interesting upbringing. I'm cigs about Suede but I absolutely adored this. 

The follow up, Afternoons with the Blinds Closed, covers off the rest of the decade.

[iamcoop]

The follow up, Afternoons with the Blinds Closed, covers off the rest of the decade.

Wasn't even aware he'd done a follow up!

[Pink Gregory]

Are those 33 1/3 books any good?

Have managed to gather a few, particularly interested in Ezra Furman writing about Transformer

[Pranet]

Remember reading Electric Eden when I read it, mainly but not totally about folk music (the Faber website says "Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day.")

Head-On by Julian Cope is good about being Julian Cope.

David Cavanagh's book about John Peel I thought was really good- called Good Night and Good Riddance. But it probably does help if you have spent a lot of your life listening to Peel.

I dunno though, most music books, if I like the subject and it isn't awful I tend to like the book. Thought about adding some other books I'd read and enjoyed but wasn't sure I just like the bands.

Oh, just remembered one, I've read the Stephen Morris book about New Order, that was good. Not read his Joy Division book.

Sorry even for me this is some poor quality posting.

[M-CORP]

'Mars By 1980 - The Story Of Electronic Music' by David Stubbs
'Tony Wilson - From Manchester With Love' by Paul Morley

James Nice's forthcoming biography on Vini Reilly and the Durutti Column, entitled 'Life Of Reilly'. (This hasn't been formally announced yet beyond a couple of Facebook posts by Nice, who told me it should be out April or May. Looking forward to it.)

I do also have Kris Needs' biography of The Orb, 'Babble On An' Ting', but that's one for the hardcore nerds who'd rather have acid-crazed superfluous descriptions of how the tracks sound, rather than the history of the band itself. Similar story with John Higgs' book on the KLF - it's great but concerns itself more with the influences and the mythos, so maybe not a 'music book' as such.

The best music book in my collection is probably Karl Bartos' book 'The Sound Of The Machine' - if you're a Kraftwerk fan this, along with Wolfgang Flür's 'I Was A Robot', is the definitive Kraftwerk biography, and much more revealing than biographies by outsiders, like that Uwe Schütte book from a few years back. 1000 pages too. Blimey.

[Oosp]

Thank you all for this thread. I love music books. Must throw in some recommendations when I get brain in order

[BJBMK2]

'Mars By 1980 - The Story Of Electronic Music' by David Stubbs
'Tony Wilson - From Manchester With Love' by Paul Morley

I struggled with that Paul Morley book, in the same way I struggled with his Bowie one. I.e, it seemed to be about everything in the known universe except it's core subject. Might give it another go, mind.

[Brundle-Fly]

The RESEARCH Volumes 1 & 2 Incredibly Strange Music were essential if you wanted an introduction to American lounge, exotica, tiki, the downright bizarre and outsider music. This stuff was indeed exotic and pretty rarified back then to Gen X newcomers when the books were published in 1993. The actual albums was quite hard to come by in Britain (if you didn't know where to look) but that soon changed about a year or so later when the easy listening revival kicked off and it was reissues a go go.

[non capisco]

A decent companion piece to Steve Hanley's 'The Big Midweek' is James Fearnley's 'Here Comes Everybody: The Story Of The Pogues', a similarly startling if admittedly one-sided account of what it's like to be in a band fronted by a wayward unpredictable bastard. Also features an unpleasant cameo from Ali Campbell from UB40 who you hope was just having a bad day that day and wasn't like that all the time.

'Complicated Game: Inside The Songs of XTC' by Andy Partridge and Todd Bernhardt (oh, you surprise me, non capisco, XTC is it?) is a must for any fellow devotees of Swindon's finest. Mostly a transcript of those two having a song by song bollock-on about XTC's back catalogue. Agreeably in depth and nerdy if you're alright with Andy's occasionally Colin Hunt-esque energy.

[The Culture Bunker]

James Nice's forthcoming biography on Vini Reilly and the Durutti Column, entitled 'Life Of Reilly'. (This hasn't been formally announced yet beyond a couple of Facebook posts by Nice, who told me it should be out April or May. Looking forward to it.)

Awww, nice to see Vini get a bit of attention again. Nice's "Shadowplayers" is a good Factory biography too. I've raved about "My Magpie Eyes..." enough times on here: the main interest is in the pre-Oasis/Colombia days, but I guess there's a kind of grimness in reading how McGee spiraled out of control before having a huge breakdown, getting sober and the label ends not longer after, unsurprisingly.

"Facing the Wrong Way", about 4AD, is something of a contrast in terms of the personalities of McGee and Ivo Watts-Russell, as well as the music involved being (for me) more interesting.

I need to pull my thumb out and pick up Paul Simpson's "The Revolutionary Spirit". I can vouch that the man can certainly a good tale in person, so it'll be interesting to see if he puts it across in print.

[non capisco]

The follow up, Afternoons with the Blinds Closed, covers off the rest of the decade.

Nice catty side anecdote in that one about how their manager Ricky Gervais was still trying to break into the industry with songs that were basically Hot Love On The Hot Love Highway, but straight faced.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Awww, nice to see Vini get a bit of attention again. Nice's "Shadowplayers" is a good Factory biography too. I've raved about "My Magpie Eyes..." enough times on here: the main interest is in the pre-Oasis/Colombia days, but I guess there's a kind of grimness in reading how McGee spiraled out of control before having a huge breakdown, getting sober and the label ends not longer after, unsurprisingly.

"Facing the Wrong Way", about 4AD, is something of a contrast in terms of the personalities of McGee and Ivo Watts-Russell, as well as the music involved being (for me) more interesting.

I need to pull my thumb out and pick up Paul Simpson's "The Revolutionary Spirit". I can vouch that the man can certainly a good tale in person, so it'll be interesting to see if he puts it across in print.

I liked that 4ad book though if I remember rightly I came away from it thinking that Robin Guthrie seemed like a complete tool.