Musicians in the pre-punk period of the mid-’70s “aspired to artistic status ... and rock in general had a renewed sense of ambition”, according to 1975: The Year the World Forgot, by Dylan Jones (Constable, £25).
This generation of music acts, which included the likes of Genesis, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and Queen, was who punk rock would fight against. It aimed to replace their mature, erudite music with pared-back, stripped-down, revved-up pop songs.
Jones, a prolific chronicler of pop music and the people who created it, is refuting the perception of pre-1976 being the preserve of prog rock bands such as Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 1975 was the paragon of adult pop, he writes. A year rich with masterpieces such as Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan), Young Americans (David Bowie), Horses (Patti Smith), The Köln Concert (Keith Jarrett), Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Another Green World (Brian Eno), and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Joni Mitchell).
Across 21 albums, Jones smartly covers the songs and music as well as the geocultural milieu that nurtured and enveloped them. An excellent book that, thoughtfully, closes with a “75 from ‘75” playlist you can listen to on Spotify.
Pure Gold: Memorable Conversations with Remarkable People, by Eamon Carr (Merrion Press, €16.99), contains recollections of a different but no less important time, when journalists could interview people without the presence of PRs and their clipboards.
Pure Gold gathers a series of interviews (culled from an assortment of mislaid cassette tapes) that Carr, a former member of Horslips and a long-established journalist, conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a motley crew of people. The list is as impressive as it is eclectic: Eartha Kitt, JP Dunleavy, Josephine Hart, Brenda Fricker, Shane MacGowan, Rudolf Nureyev, Jack Charlton, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, John Mortimer and more.
The collection is much more than a conversation between two people or, God forbid, a set of predictable questions that too often receive rote responses. As well as insightfully deconstructing the interview process, Carr has a knack for going off-piste, judging the mood of the interviewee and burrowing down as far as possible.
Earnest indie rock bands, he writes, answered questions with quotes that “were homogenous, interchangeable”. Not so the interviewees here, who pounced on Carr’s puckish, innate curiosity with a speed that less engaged inquisitors can only dream of.
There is enough of a life story in Music and Mayhem, by Keith Donald (Lilliput Press, €18.95) to fill in many hours of questions and answers, but the meat, so to speak, is in the reading. The career musician, now in his 80s, is best known, perhaps, for being a member of the groundbreaking ensemble group, Moving Hearts. Donald’s peaks and troughs in life are documented with assured pragmatism.
“My days are numbered” is the kind of first chapter opening sentence that sets the scene for what follows (spoiler: it isn’t pretty). From trusted boundaries being broken to grasping an instinctive love of music, from being diagnosed with lifelong PTSD to embarking on, writes Donald, “a thirty-year internal battle between attraction and revulsion, emotionally up when the drink kicked in, down when it wasn’t available, the rollercoaster of addiction”.
Music courses through the book, needless to say, but the “mayhem” of the title runs it a close second, and often the two are locked in a battle for supremacy. Stitched into the fabric of each is a distinctive history of Ireland’s fledgling music industry. It is one populated by showbands (“human gramophones that rehearsed and learned three new songs every week”), Moving Hearts (“unlike any band I’d played with”) and shoals of business sharks and redemption. A life lived? You bet.
One could say the same for US rapper Tupac Shakur (1971-1996), who is regarded not only as one of hip-hop’s most influential figures but also, through his music and activism, a torchbearer for highlighting political injustice and the marginalisation of African Americans.
With the primary motivation of presenting hip-hop’s most noted nonconformist, Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, by Dean Van Nguyen (White Rabbit, £25), maintains a firm balance between placing Shakur within the context of the Black Panther movement (both of his parents were party members) and avoiding the usual biographical cliches of hero worship or downgrading unsavoury aspects of the subject’s life (including a conviction in 1994 for sexual abuse).
There is also much to admire about Van Nguyen’s industrious, thought-provoking research, oral histories and thorough critical analysis of Shakur’s significance. Those looking for a strictly linear approach will be disappointed, but anyone (Shakur fans or not) interested in hip-hop history and Black radical political ideology will, with some justification, love it.
Another unconventional life is outlined in The Absence: The Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer, by Budgie, aka Peter Clarke (White Rabbit, £25). Merseyside-born Budgie studied art in nearby Liverpool, where in the mid-1970s he joined fledgling punk bands the Spitfire Boys and Big in Japan.
He is best known, however, as the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees, which he joined in 1979 until their dissolution in 1996. Afterwards, he and Siouxsie (with whom he was romantically attached) formed The Creatures. Following their divorce in 2007, Budgie continued in music. His most recent work was a 2023 collaborative album with former Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst and Irish musician/producer Jacknife Lee.
The Absence, however, is anything but an orderly trawl through back pages. Rather, it is an evocative, lyrical memoir of boyhood; from “on the walk back to the guesthouse along the Golden Mile, my dad and I would stop to buy a takeaway of fish and chips” to remembering after-show hangers-on “Siouxsie might play along… almost as a game, but most times she would get irritated, snap, and tell them to f*** off”. He also reflects on a doomed marriage: “Our intense love was real, as was our intense anger and disgust”.
A bold, bracing retelling of Goth beginnings and unhappy endings.
