Many people involved in rock and pop music live their lives in the shadows of the stars they work for, which is why The Tastemaker: My Life with the Legends and Geniuses of Rock Music, by Tony King (Faber, £18) is such an eye-opener. If you’re the kind of music lover that wants to read about famous people not only acting badly but also being the “legends and geniuses” of the book title, then you have come to the right place.
As a teenager, King started working at Decca Records in 1958; within several years he was rubbing shoulders with The Beatles, Elton John, The Rolling Stones and many more major music industry names, but there is another story here, namely King’s personal trek from alcoholism and converting to Catholicism to being diagnosed with HIV (in 2005) and, some years later, Parkinson’s. Twinning the two “lives” makes for a gratifying and often poignant read.
More career accomplishments and life events are retrospectively explored in Alice Cooper @ 75, by Gary Graff (Motor Books, £60), but there is an additional treat for fans of the man who (on stage only) has been impaled, electrocuted, hanged, executed, and beheaded: this coffee table tome is adorned by an unusually vibrant collection of images that visually chart the course of a teenage Vincent Furnier innocently holding a puppy to a rock star who (says Cooper, who legally changed his name in the early 1970s) accidentally killed a chicken during one of the band’s early US shows. Therein began the somewhat provocative theatricality (or, as he has said, ramming a pointed stake into “the heart of the love generation”) that has sustained Cooper’s career ever since.
The chapters are short, with context provided by Graff’s decent research (Cooper isn’t directly interviewed), overviews of all of the important albums (especially those released in the 1970s, the decade in which Cooper enjoyed a particularly praised creative period), and insights into personal matters that included trips to rehab to break his alcoholism and drug addiction, and recording four albums in the early 1980s that he barely remembers making.
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Somewhat less prone to surrealistic flights of fancy and deliberate confrontation, the life of Irish ballad singer Paddy Reilly receives its debut outing in Paddy Reilly: From the Fields of Athenry to The Dubliners and Beyond, by Paddy Reilly, with Tom Gilmore (O’Brien Press, €19.99). With the first chapter titled Good Old Days My Arse!, however, there’s a sense from the start that this isn’t going to be a memoir lit by dull wattage. Reilly’s life is corralled by Tuam journalist Tom Gilmore, and he regularly hits the mark in a chronological outline that charts a career from his native Rathcoole, Co Dublin (“People from Dublin used to come out to Rathcoole to pick blackberries, and they thought we lived in the bush, which we did. There was nothing much here. Three pubs… and that was it.”) to becoming Ireland’s best-known balladeer (as well as being a member of The Dubliners for almost 10 years, following the departure of Ronnie Drew in the mid-1990s).
[ The mysterious Limerick man on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the MoonOpens in new window ]
The narrative is, perhaps unwisely, interrupted by two chapters (Paddy Through the Eyes of Others, and Irish Sports Stars Sing Paddy’s Praises), but the outcome is nonetheless what you might expect: an assured telling of “an unassuming man who can turn any conversation into an erudite discussion”.
In a small number of signed copies, Kate Bush has written a message in invisible ink, to be read only when the signature page is placed under ultraviolet light
There is little unassuming about Dark Side of the Moon, the Pink Floyd album regarded (not by everyone, of course) as one of the best rock/prog music albums ever recorded. Statistically, it is also one of the best-selling albums of all time (over 50 million), and this year, as it celebrates its 50th anniversary, you can guarantee you’ll be reading and hearing a lot more about it. First out of the traps is Pink Floyd and the Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years, by Martin Popoff (Motor Books, £35), which outlines in glorious Technicolor everything you might want to know about the record and what went into making it.
Unlike other books about the album, particularly those that go into endless forensic detail, Popoff’s book takes a rather high-minded “DSOTM for Dummies” approach, in that there are handy, bite-sized sections throughout (Supporting Cast, Art & Packaging, mini-biographies, track-by-track outlines) that casual admirers of the album could well find fascinating. Festooned from page to page with images, illustrations, tour posters, memorabilia and other ephemera, the book might be superfluous for original and/or diehard fans of the album (and band), but if there’s a younger person in your life who wants to find out what all the fuss was about, this book couldn’t come recommended highly enough.
There always seemed to be little fuss about Leonard Cohen, and if his serene and often profound albums didn’t tell you that then perhaps Absent Friend – A Meditation on a Friendship with Leonard Cohen, by John McKenna (The Harvest Press, €15) will. Irish writer McKenna has good cause to use the word “friendship” in the title, as he and Cohen enjoyed a relaxed but important relationship throughout the years that went beyond the usual artist/fan association. From the early 1970s, when McKenna became enthralled by Cohen’s early albums and poetry (less so with his novels), the connections began. The memoir is a compact (roughly 30,000 words) but engaging read, with correspondence going back and forth between the two friends via emails and notes (wry, full of comradeship, intuitive understanding). The result is a heart-warming and realistic encomium for a man McKenna describes as “a genius”, yet someone whose “humility was deep and real”.
[ Leonard Cohen obituary: Revered poet, novelist, musicianOpens in new window ]
Anyone expecting Lou Reed (“a study in reckless excess,” he wrote in 2010) to give the lowdown on Velvet Underground and David Bowie, or albums such as Transformer and Berlin might be disappointed with The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, by Lou Reed (Faber, £30), a posthumous memoir co-edited/curated by his wife, Laurie Anderson. However, anyone with an interest in what Reed terms the “technique of explosive internal power” and his refusal to “go gently into fat-senility-lethargy” will find much to mull over. Featuring previously unpublished writings on aspects of martial arts, and interviews with Reed’s friends (photographer Mick Rock, producer Tony Visconti, performer Iggy Pop, artist Julian Schnabel), Tai Chi teachers, family, and close music industry associates, this may be a tangential if niche addition to Reed’s personal history, but it’s much more insightful about the man and his work practices than you might think.
Song lyrics can be upfront, vague, plain-speaking, abstract, poetic, or polemical. In How To Be Invisible: Selected Lyrics, by Kate Bush (Faber, £10.99), the cherry-picked work of one of the finest songwriters of the past 45 years is all of these and more. In what is a typical gesture by Bush (who writes a new introduction to this paperback edition), in a small number of signed copies she has written a message in invisible ink, to be read only when the signature page is placed under ultraviolet light. The obvious song lyrics are here, as well as some that fair-weather fans might not expect, but for avid followers, the enjoyment of deciphering Bush’s meticulously chosen words continues.
