Poptimist Books?

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I've just finished reading Pet Shop Boys: Literally, which I rather liked. It felt wonderfully anachronistic to sit on the tube with 1989-era Neil and Chris staring out from the cover, and, as the PSBs were the first band I really liked back when I was wee, to get little insights behind the songs and image. They do come across as a pair of big whiny jessies, though. Guess it goes to show how quickly one gets accustomed to the money and the tedium of popstardom...

Anyway, it's made me want to read more pop books. Trouble is, I feel I've either read all the good ones or can never find what I'm looking for on the library shelves. Past favourites have included:

Feel by Chris Heath
Lost in Music by Giles Smith
Living Through Pop, ed. Andrew Blake (read this for my degree, but it's a good mix of academe and the anecdotal)
The Shoe by Gordon Legge (a novel, but sums up the effect of music on a young boy's life better than anything else I've read)
You Don't Have To Say You Love Me by Simon Napier-Bell
The Look by Paul Gorman
Tainted Life by Marc Almond 
Love Is The Drug, ed. John Aizlewood (I'm quite fond of the Dexys chapter)
Hell for Leather by Seb Hunter (approx 1000x more entertaining than I expected) 
EDIT:
Forgot The Nation's Favourite - one of my favourite books ever, for shame - and Bill Drummond's 45, which isn't really all about music but does have nice pieces in about Crystal Day and the Bunnymen's rabbit ears tour.

I have Saint Morrissey, Rip It Up... and England's Dreaming sat on my shelf, taunting me. I'm after something a bit more, well, suited to reading on the bus in the morning, though. 

What's your favourite pop book? And, even better, what made you throw it across the room with irritation?

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Once In A Lifetime... Crazy Days Of Acid House is a cracking read.

Was k-disappointed with Hip Priest (MES & The Fall biog) though. So badly written as to make an interesting band sound dull.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Ah! Hip Priest is in the box of books under the stairs. Only £3 from Fopp, though, so there's a limit to how disappointed with it I'll be allowed to be.

YES! I've read Once In A Lifetime, it's great.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom by Nik Cohn - the best book about pop in the 50s and 60s that I've ever read, never losing sight of the music's roots in commerce and fashion (he acknolwedges the mythic power of the stuff too, and also in his Rock Dreams, which is also awesome).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It's total bus reading too - very short chapters, very easy reading.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Altered State by Matthew Collins is excellent on the rave and dance music explosion of the late 80s/early 90s. Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy digs deeper into the same music and is compelling on how underground scenes evolve, but I think Collins is better on the cultural impact of E and rave.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Is it accessible enough for someone who knows naff all about rave itself and a bit about the subculture?

[celentari.livejournal.com]

Black Vinyl, White Powder is quite good fun: the link between drugs and music, decade by decade, through the big gay eyes of Simon Napier Bell.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I quite fancy I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch.

ARGH

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I can't understand why people like Lost In Music so much, I found it INCREDIBLY IRRITATING!

A quite amusing read by the way is Pete Waterman's autobiog, it's so blustering that it's hilarious.

You're missing out The Boy Looked At Johnny! England's Dreaming is how punk WAS, TBLAJ is how it FELT - ie annoying/GREAT/snotty/silly etc etc.

Re: ARGH

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Is it easy enough to get hold of?

I read Lost In Music at fifteen, when I was the only person I knew who was really really into music. Not re-read for a few years, but I'm still very fond of it. I still love the line about Cupid and Psyche '85: 'an album on which nobody does anything unless a computer tells them to"

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I remember Seb Hunter from school (I was a pupil at the school he describes working at in the book). I think I had already got over my love for poodle metal by the time he was there though.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

What's put me off picking it up is that I always found the Pistols over-rated - not culturally, obviously, but musically. I was so disappointed when I actually heard them for the first time...

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I v.much liked England's Dreaming by Jon Savage. There's something marvellous about the way he transmits his desire that the story should have ended differently. V.similar in feeling to that chapter in Mason and Dixon where Pynchon imagines the two of them not turning back at the Ohio, and going on to run the line forwards to the Pacific and then back across the Atlantic, finally coming to rest in a sort of new Atlantis, midway between Britain and America.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

may i suggest not trying to read aesthetics of rock by R Meltzer on a bus. it is a small book, so easy to carry, but COMPLETELY BRANE-BENDING...

Morley's words and pictures music is a bit too big for bus reading i'd sa, not quite as big as rip it up, but still quite hefty. speaking of rip it up, i did find it quite disappointing, simon rarely gets going in it, there are swathes of chapters (most of the ones about america for eg) that almost certainly belong in geeta's another book...

how about 45 or The Manual by bill drummond? they're a good size and both aces.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

45 is ACE! How could I forget that? Probably because I'm swearing at journalists.

We have a house joke about Words and Music...everytime Can't Get You Out Of My Head comes on tele one of us intones 'Kylie Minogue is speeding into the heart of pop...' I started reading it once but thought it best to buy my own copy and work through at a slower pace rather than in the three weeks Manchester Libraries allowed. Not got round to it yet, though.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Ronnie Spector's Be My Baby is very good, you get a good bit of Wall Of Sound era gossip, lots of dirt on Big Phil (Spector, obv) and much amusing rivalry between himself and Brian Wilson.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Ah dammit, that's another I read and forgot. Me and a friend were discussing the inflatable Phil a while back...

[dansette.livejournal.com]

The most poptimistic book is the Very Best of Smash Hits if you can get it!

[mippy.livejournal.com]

TELL ME THIS IS A REAL THING.

I still have my 80s issues in a box-file at my parents' house. They have been told that if it gets tampered with I'm never coming home for Christmas.

Speaking of Poptimist books

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have never read Dave Rimmer's Like Punk Never Happened. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow?

Re: Speaking of Poptimist books

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I can send you my copy, just email me your address.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The Busted Unofficial Annual 2005 is pretty good too.

HAHA SORRY FRANK!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

31 comments and nobody has mentioned koganbot's book Real Punks Don't Wear Black. IT IS AWESOME. I actually did read some on the bus, too.

And while we're at it

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

You won't get much finer bus reading - or throw-book-across-room-then-lovingly-retrieve reading - than Chuck Eddy's The Accidental Evolution Of Rock N Roll. Some of the stuff he writes about makes more sense to Americans but generally it's an amazing book which will change how you think about pop.

32 comments...

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Wot no Adorno?

Re: 32 comments...

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Adorno would've liked Morrissey. Thankfully, my course tutor agreed with me in this.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i, like punk never happened by dave rimmer
ii. hammer of the gods by stephen davis
iii. nico: the last bohemian by james young
iv. seven years of plnety by ben thompson
v. stairway to hell by chuck eddy

plus also

reals punks don't wear black by lj:user/koganbot/

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

tom on friday if you remind me i will lend you the two rimmer books* and give you back OLD PETER'S RUSSIAN TALES

*the other one is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST and is even better imo

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I do! I think I may have mentioned reading this recently while you were on holiday.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

(in reply to Tom on Dave Rimmer) -- lj is messing up my comments today. Or I am a moron.

[damnspynovels.livejournal.com]

Does The Nation's Favourite count?

If it doesn't, it'll have to be 45 like someone else said above.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

TNF is the single greatest book about 90s pop music.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Years ago I bought Say it one more time for the broken-hearted: The country side of Southern soul by Barney Hoskyns... still never read it.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i have the girls aloud annual 2006

[whalefish.livejournal.com]

I've always liked The Last Party by John Harris (um, I think), although it is a bit dry in places. I like it because I was really 'into' indie during that so-called Britpop period, but being a schoolkid was totally unaware of the whole story and the politics at the time.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure if there WAS a story, or just a couple of coincidences/interactions that ol' Weller-hair has knitted up into a State Of The Nation tome.

[hano.livejournal.com]

You should check out Michael Bracewell's 'England is Mine - Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie', a meditation on how the pop aesthetic reflected the 20th Century.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah it's quite good that, evocative and smart in some bits, dumb in others, though I worry that it inadvertently caused The Libertines.

His book on the 90s is rotten though!

Philip Norman?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

What do ppl think of his pop-related books - Shout! and the Elton biography?

Speaking of Elton, the first good pop book I read was a 1976 US paperback biog of his life and career up to that point. On the face of it, it appeared to be a cheap cash-in job but it was quite well-researched and critiqued the discography in some detail.

Re: Philip Norman?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think shout! is pretty awful >:(

Starlust

[giddyoldgoat.livejournal.com]

If you can find a copy, 'Starlust' by Fred and Judy Vermorel is my favourite book about pop music

The Faber book of Pop, the one edited by Jon Savage and Hanif Kureshi, has gd stuff - Paul Johnson on the Beatles!

Re: Starlust

[mippy.livejournal.com]

That is an ace compilation.

[spittake.livejournal.com]

I know hating on "academic" books is sometimes popular but Norma Coates' "Can't We Talk About Music:Rock and Gender on the Internet" is great.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

There's one called Punk Rock: so What? which is academic but slips down easily.