A great life story combined with excellent recall and refreshingly honest writing is a bonus when it comes to any memoir, but the superb Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success, by Miki Berenyi (Nine Eight Books, £22) achieves brownie points by delivering details with real dexterity. To say she lays her proverbial cards on the table is an understatement.
“I can’t tell if I’m living life to the full,” she writes about the rigours of touring, “being driven into self-destructive patterns by my f***ed-up past or merely bored and seeking distraction. I need to get a grip.” Other areas, also, get a severe and dispiriting seeing to: Britpop’s innate misogyny, music industry manoeuvres (“a lot of opportunists made a pile of cash while the bands got hyped, then vilified and finally chewed up, spat out and destroyed”), how the music of that era was “hijacked by elitist d***heads” and how “sexist bulls**t is becoming commonplace and reframed as ‘edgy’”. Two words? Brace yourself.
One musician mentioned (unflatteringly) in Berenyi’s memoir is sometime Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, author of Verse, Chorus, Monster! (Faber, £24.99), a memoir that is very often the polar opposite of nitty-gritty and more an idiosyncratic traipse through his life and times. What it lacks in hard details (those looking for Blur-related gossip can exit stage left) it makes up for with vivid accounts of his anxiety levels (“as long as I was required to be in the studio by ten, it was absolutely fine”) and struggles with alcoholism (“I never found the sweet spot between pleasure and excess…”). Coxon, also, is scathing about the contradictory expectations of being a member of Blur and a solo artist. The former, he writes, felt like a career, while solo shows “reminded me of what a blast it was being in a band”.
A similar blast of gratification can be found by reading In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ‘70s Britain, by Will Hodgkinson (Nine Eight Books, £25). Taking its title from The New Seekers’ 1971 number one UK single, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony), Hodgkinson’s book lobs into polite conversation a theoretical grenade few people might wish to engage with: that despite ardent love for the somewhat jittery side of 1970s music (from Roxy Music to Sex Pistols, from Bowie to Teardrop Explodes), what we all genuinely prefer is to whistle along to Middle of the Road’s Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, St Cecelia’s Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air), and much more besides.
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Even from a distance of several undoubtedly reflective decades, Hodgkinson’s premise is too absurd to buy into, but you can’t but admire a book stuffed with superb genre research, socio-political-cultural insight, and a description of the aforementioned Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep as a song with “chokingly high levels of Euro frivolity and a total commitment to meaninglessness.”
A former girlfriend recollects that while he was on tour, he didn’t mind her going out with her friends to a movie or a restaurant, ‘but I want to have seen the movie or been to that restaurant first’
Ten years after his untimely death at the age of 58, one of Ireland’s most applauded guitarists receives a fully authorised biography, but those who presume that “fully authorised” equals hagiography will need to look elsewhere. In the pages of Gary Moore, by Harry Shapiro (Jawbone Press, £14.95) you will read of the Belfast man being described as virtuosic, a chronic perfectionist, unreliable, and controlling (a former girlfriend recollects that while he was on tour, he didn’t mind her going out with her friends to a movie or a restaurant, “but I want to have seen the movie or been to that restaurant first”). Personality traits aside, this perceptive book also highlights his time in Skid Row, Thin Lizzy, numerous other rock bands, and his solo career. An honest tribute to an exceptional musician with a reputation for being, as Thin Lizzy drummer Brian Downey, wryly observes, “cranky”.
Speaking of which, there is as much crankiness in Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom, by Simon Napier-Bell (Unbound, £25) as you could hope for. Subtitled Lessons from a Dissolute Life, music industry insider/manager Napier-Bell has previously written about his remarkable career, but here he focuses on his personal life (with many juicy sidebars) via 60 short chapters that take in his childhood, his sexuality, 1960s swinging London, and his emergence as one of pop music’s most successful managers. The stories roll on, unstoppably, with no small bite and slivers of wit.
From career chats (“What are you going to do when you grow up?” asked Napier-Bell’s public school career adviser. The reply is eminently quotable. “Eat in restaurants, sir”), Marc Bolan and Boris Yeltsin to Wham! and Sinéad O’Connor (“blunt, uncensored, unstoppable, passionate, cool, manic, honest, deceptive, solid as a rock and completely unstable. She’s the only artist I ever managed who gave me a Christmas present and the only one where my management ended in a legal dispute.”), what we have here is an unremittingly gossipy, gritty and warm memoir.
‘Dexys took breaks at a small café… Sometimes no one would speak at all… Silence from start to finish… It was like something from an art film’
Napier-Bell will be remembered for leading a somewhat incident-drenched life, but other people experience a less flamboyant side of the music industry. Throughout What’s She Like: A Memoir, by Helen O’Hara (Route Publishing, £20), the classically trained sometime Dexys (Midnight Runners) violinist, threads of what-might-have-been run alongside a pragmatic mindset. Despite what for many might be the core interest in the book (her time with Dexys and their lead singer, Kevin Rowland), O’Hara tells her own story before and after her time with the group: declining an offer from the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, appearing on Top of the Pops for the first time with Come on Eileen (“if I hear the song today, I still get a thrill”), taking a break from music for almost 25 years, and then returning to the fray. We are pulled back, however, to her 1980s pop star years (“Dexys took breaks at a small café… Sometimes no one would speak at all… Silence from start to finish… It was like something from an art film”) and her relationship with Rowland, which is discreetly handled.
Another member of a very well-known UK 1980s band comes out of the cold, so to speak, and into the public arena. Ask anyone who is a recent convert to The Human League and/or Heaven 17, and they probably won’t have the foggiest who Martyn Ware is. That gap in their music knowledge will change if/when they read Electronically Yours Vol 1 (Hachette/Constable, £20).
Ware’s story is fascinating if perhaps salutary: the musical brain that had crucial parts to play in the success of the aforementioned Sheffield new wave/synth-pop groups wound up almost a forgotten figure (in commercial terms, at least) only to find creative succour as a producer for major music acts that included Tina Turner. Latterly, Ware has become noted as a “sound muralist”, but for fans of 1980s music, the nuts and bolts (or should that be diodes and valves?) of the book focus on his days as an aspiring, politicised non-musician trying to break out of dull nine-to-five jobs. Unusually for autobiographies (but which makes sense here, considering Ware’s cerebral creative approach), appendices include an in-depth analysis of the albums and songs he has been involved with, and a list of 100 pieces of music that have shaped him as a musician.
