The best music books of 2020
The year’s most gripping, terrifying, bleakly moving and ultimately transcendent music book was Mark Lanegan’s memoir Sing Backwards and Weep (White Rabbit, £20).
It traces the American singer-songwriter’s wayward life from his childhood as a “self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock’n’roll.” Decades of addiction saw him plunge from 1990s grunge rock star to vagrant petty criminal; desperate, homeless and humbled in Los Angeles, aged 33. Like the best of his gritty, gothic songs, it is starkly written and savagely honest, ripping a lid off rock’s toxic romanticisation of heroin. Lanegan’s guilt over the death of his friend Kurt Cobain remains bitterly potent, and imbues his dark, narrative with a soulful self-awareness.
Not everyone was a fan. Liam Gallagher was so incensed by Lanegan’s portrait of him as “an obvious poser, a would-be playground bully” that he challenged him to a fight via Twitter. Lanegan’s brutal response (“Coke addicts are f------junkies too, you tool, the stupidest kind”) suggests sobriety, success and literary acclaim have not mellowed him.
Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke takes a rather different approach to heroin addiction, treating it as a source of humour in his sharply observed, entertaining memoir, I Wanna Be Yours (Picador, £20). His infatuation with narcotics begins when he is given morphine while suffering from childhood tuberculosis (“any excuse to skip school”) and ends with a near-death experience while filming a Sugar Puffs commercial. “Relentless tragedy is always hilarious,” he notes of his eventual recovery. “At some point the laughter has to stop.”
Although not written with the same degree of literary élan, the year’s most touching and revelatory rock autobiography was Rob Halford’s Confess (Headline, £20). The lead singer of veteran Birmingham heavy metal band Judas Priest serves up the story of “a gay man fronting a straight band in a macho world”. Halford’s closeted homosexuality drove him to suicidal despair before he came out at 39, only to realise that his band, family and fans had long since guessed his secret. Halford, who these days refers to himself as “the stately homo of heavy metal”, features amusing cameos from Quentin Crisp, Andy Warhol, Madonna, and the Queen, who poses the question: “Heavy metal, why does it have to be so loud?”
It doesn’t always pay to be nice. For a brief shining moment in 1975, Peter Frampton was the biggest rock star in the world. Do You Feel Like I Do? (Hachette, £22.99) recounts his slow rise, precipitous fall and gentle recovery. It’s an extraordinary story crammed with famous names: he was only 18 when he beat schoolmate David Bowie to fame by joining Humble Pie, and went on to lead an extremely colourful life, jamming with everyone from ex-Beatles to Led Zeppelin. But his tone is stiflingly pleasant; his tales never truly come to life.
Serious readers will find more to chew on in Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn (Omnibus, £20), Graeme Thompson’s overdue study of a brilliant talent led astray by his own poisonous character defects. The virtuoso guitarist and songwriter whose influence can be detected all the way from U2’s The Edge to Ed Sheeran, died aged 60 in 2009 in a parlous condition after a life of drunkenness and debauchery. Thompson somehow makes you care about this violent, alcoholic misogynist who once impaled himself on a fence and crashed his car into a cow.
Highly recommended for 1960s buffs is the large format Ready Steady Go! The Weekend Starts Here by Andy Neill (BMG, £39.99), a forensic account of Britain’s first great TV pop show. It is packed with photographs of show favourites such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Dusty Springfield, and crammed with intriguing encounters. Its neutral prose, however, leaves you speculating as to what really went on when the likes of David Hockney, Vidal Sassoon and Michael Caine squeezed into the green room to watch Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and the Supremes, before decamping to the Ad Lib club to dance with Christine Keeler and drink with John Lennon. One indication that everything might not be as innocent as it was presented at the time is the way Paul Gadd flits through the book’s pages as a studio warm-up man, later to change his name to Gary Glitter. The rest is infamy.
The era is more fully fleshed out in Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (Fourth Estate, £20) in which the brilliant humourist juxtaposes leading players in the pop revolution with more peripheral characters, such as the Beatles’s brief replacement drummer Jimmie Nicol, “too forgotten a figure to even feature in roundups of forgotten figures”. Ringo Starr refers to the landscape of mega-fame they came to inhabit as “Weirdland.” “The weirdness was not controlled at the start,” notes press officer Derek Taylor of Apple Corps. “You can’t control weirdness, anyway.” Brown’s delightful look back at that weirdness is well complemented by veteran music journalist David Hepworth’s informative and insightful account of the British pop invasion of America: Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There (Bantam, £20).
A more intimate perspective on the power of music is offered by journalist Peter Paphides in his touching memoir Broken Greek (Quercus, £20). By revisiting his childhood as an immigrant in Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s, Paphides shows how music acts on our imaginations and emotions, to become integrated with our lives. He spins dazzling links from The Clangers to Radiohead and depicts Abba as surrogate parents whose final divorce hit in 1982, The Day Before You Came, was so bleak that “it didn’t even have a chorus”. This is a sweet book about cheesy pop music that dispenses with the notion of cool, to make readers hear afresh.
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