A splendid treat for music aficionados.
Interviews with more than two dozen leading British rock and pop songwriters.
“God Save the Noise,” declares the knowledgeable writer/musician Rachel, whose celebratory debut gathers the voices of songwriters from Ray Davies of the Kinks, whose songs of sexual ambiguity reflect a music-hall tradition, to folk musician Laura Marling, one of a handful of female singer-songwriters included here. Rachel traces the beginning of modern British pop to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Love Me Do” (1962), and he has selected the songwriters based on their “depth, originality and imagination.” Uniformly interesting, the lengthy interviews explore every imaginable aspect of the art, from the songwriters’ beliefs and working practices to sources of inspiration to such technical matters as rhyme, harmony and melody. As Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) says, there’s “no fixed way of working,” a sentiment echoed by many of the songwriters. “I’ve found the most stuff comes out when I’m really down or I’m really feeling up,” says Andy Partridge of XTC, whose “creative highpoints were undermined by mental-health problems, addiction to prescription drugs and diminishing sales returns.” Others find songs come to them at unpredictable times. “They’re not so much songs as slices of life,” says John Lydon (Sex Pistols). “They’re stories.” Says Annie Lennox: “You just have to capture the ideas as they come.” Robin Gibb (Bee Gees) likens the search for melody to playing Scrabble: “[Y]ou’re constantly looking for seven-letter words.” The interviewees range from acclaimed artist Sting, who says he is less interested in finding a place in history for songs like “Fields of Gold” than in “getting through the show without fucking up,” to the lesser-known renegade Lee Mavers (the La’s), who hasn’t released a song in 25 years. Others include Jimmy Page, Joan Armatrading, Noel Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker, Lily Allen, Billy Bragg, Damon Albarn, Paul Weller and Johnny Marr.
A splendid treat for music aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250051295
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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