Heartfelt
Hibee follows Hearts for a season
Category: Biography
pow?
The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize
This book is not only a comprehensive account of Creation records but also manages to place everything in the context of the fortunes and transformations of the british record industry over the course of a couple of decades.
Alan McGee reportedly hates it, which is a good indication of just how close to the truth the author has managed to get. Indeed it is a deeply impressive piece of research before you even consider it’s other merits.
It is authoritative and intelligent, thorough and thought-provoking. It’s single great flaw is that reading another page on the breakdown of the relationships in The House of Love or another page on the umpteenth studio that My Bloody Valentine spent two hours in before Kevin Shields decided it wasn’t good enough kills much of the momentum of the story and you can start to get bogged down bored with it and it can become a chore to get to the next interesting bit.
I think that you really have to be keen to know everything about Creation before even thinking about picking this one up. If you are you’ll find that you couldn’t wish for better overview.
swan?
Not A Runner Bean
Mark Steel’s rather idiosyncratic
pious?
Our Band Could Be Your Life
The story of the American indie underground in the eighties as told through short biographies of some of the leading lights of the scene.
I really enjoyed at least half of these short bios, as some of the bands had fascinating interpersonal struggles, financial problems and made great music.
However, the author made some odd decisions. Your band is only indie if your records are recorded for an indie label who used only indie distribution? A pointless distinction if you ask me. If, as I suspect, he only did this to avoid covering REM for the millionth time, then why not just say that?
Why, also, decide to not cover the major label careers of the bands that he does write about beyond a brief sneery paragraph or two about how none of their records were as good once they took money from the big boys?
Why spend countless pages wittering on about the idealism of certain bands? Sure they had admirable politics, that’s great, I want to read about the music too at some point though.
Maybe I’m too comfortably cynical about the music business as a whole but the whole concept of indie purity just seems silly to me nowadays. So I’m docking points for his pious devotion to his precious hardcore band’s purity.
Otherwise highly recommended for those with an interest in 80’s underground indie music.
koma?
Margrave Of The Marshes
John Peel’s autobiography was posthumously completed by his Wife and children.
A fascinating, if scattershot, telling of Peel’s life up until shortly before he married his first wife and his radio career took off in the USA, is as much as he completed before his death of a heart attack in Peru in October 2004.
The rest of the book is related by his wife, Sheila (also known as Pig), and is a bittersweet reminiscence of her life with him and an honest telling of the obsessiveness that drove Peel in doing his job.
It made me miss Peel very much.
If you ever spent time listening to the man’s radio shows, you have to read this book.
brief update (1)
24 Hour Party People
This is the novelization of the script of one my favourite films of
recent years.
It’s a very entertaining fictional acccount of the true story of Factory
Records.
The book is by Anthony Wilson who ran Factory Records and who fills the
book with asides that point out the bits of the film that are utterly
untrue, kind of true or just plain true. It’s an enjoyable read