“So, what’s it like to be a girl in a band?” This is the question the English press would repeatedly ask Kim Gordon (and one quoted in 2009’s ‘Sacred Trickster’) when Sonic Youth were starting out, and one which she seeks to…
Alan McGee – Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label In an alternative universe there’s a book called The Man Who Discovered Oasis – and that title alone would be enough to ensure you handed over your money. In this reality, however,…
Haiku Salut, who describe themselves as ‘Baroque-Pop-Folktronic-Neo-Classical-Something-Or-Other’ might have had all the right intentions when they decided to publish their series of backstage Haikus in book form. Japanese Poems Steal Brains is charming and well-made as a physical object, but…
Zoe Howe couldn’t have chosen a more fitting title for her account of one of pop music’s most iconic and successful figures of the last century. Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours demonstrates how the subject’s ‘visions and dreams’ would…
I meet Simon Mason one Thursday evening in Joe’s Bar on Chalk Farm Road, half a mile up the street from Camden Town, the spiritual home of Britpop. Twenty years ago Simon was selling drugs to its major players: bands,…
In an alternate universe it’s Simon Wolstencroft rather than Mike Joyce pounding the tom toms at the beginning of The Smiths’ ‘The Queen is Dead’. In some other reality, it’s not Reni banging the drums for the Stone Roses: Funky…
Simon Spence has written books about Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stone Roses, Depeche Mode and the Donnelly Brothers . His new book, Happy Mondays: Excess All Areas presents the band’s story in full for the first time. We caught up with him…