With a subtitle that could be a song lyric blasted out in a hot and sweaty club, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City, by Mark Ronson (Century, £22), might not outline the sonic nuts and bolts of the job, but if you’re looking for a fascinating insight into how music lovers are created not out of thin air but their environment, then you’ve bought the right book.
Ronson’s background is equally compelling. His father was a music publisher, his mother a charismatic socialite, his stepfather (Mick Jones) a member of ’80s arena rock band Foreigner, and his teenage friends included Sean Lennon. Ronson may have been running with a particular NYC celeb-connected pack, but from the time he began to develop his burgeoning skills as a working DJ, he had already discovered that night time was the only escape from certain levels of “paranoia, anxiety and a darkness that could swallow you whole”.
By the time he was 20, Ronson was well on his way, and Night People… thrums not only with the total-recall memories of that period of his life (and the high-profile names that go with it), but also a highly attuned romanticism that he describes as “my love letter to a vanished era that shaped not just my career but my identity”.
[ Ringo Starr: ‘Every generation, if they’re into music, listens to the Beatles’Opens in new window ]
There is another vanishing era touched upon throughout Living in the Present with John Prine: A Personal Memoir, by Tom Piazza (Omnibus Press, £18.99), and that is the gradual disappearance of unique songwriters of a certain era. As each year passes they too pass, but, asks US novelist Tom Piazza, has there ever been a songwriter as good as John Prine? According to the author, Prine had never wanted to write a memoir, especially one where he felt “trapped in a forced march through every detail of his life”, and we don’t get that here.
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There are biographical elements, of course, but the heart of the book is a literary road trip that started in the spring of 2018, when the author and his subject first met, and ended, somewhat bedraggled, more than two years later, in April 2020, when Prine died of Covid-19 complications. Captured in between are taped conversations featuring Prine’s instinctively humane observations and Piazza’s inherent leaning towards elegant prose.
Did we say unique songwriters? Hail, hail rock’n’roll, and pass on anniversary greetings! Bruce Springsteen & Born to Run: 50 Years, by Sean Egan (Motorbooks, £38), is perhaps the first out of the blocks for nabbing this year’s Luxury Coffee Table Book prize. The background to such a landmark signature song and album – management, pre-album career, musicians, what inspired it, track-by-track analyses and themes, recording history, the accompanying tour that transported Springsteen from cult status to the mainstream, and post-album output up to 1984’s Born in the USA – is expertly outlined.
The cherry on top, however, is the design aesthetic used throughout. For every chapter (Born to Rule: The Reception, and Roadrunner: The Tour are especially insightful, even to the aficionado), there are complementary images that either pull you into the text or jump off the page.
Equally compelling, but not always for the right reasons, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, by Daniel Rachel (White Rabbit, £25), highlights both the stupidity and subversion of musicians’ flirting with Nazism and associated imagery. From wearing Nazi uniforms (including the Who drummer Keith Moon, various members of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page, The Sweet’s Steve Priest) and flaunting swastikas (Siouxsie and the Banshees) to bands naming themselves after concentration-camp brothels (Joy Division), the book astutely traces the global rise of fascism and its reverberations in pop culture.
[ Four music books chart unconventional lives in the industryOpens in new window ]
Some rock stars deserve the brickbats, including Motörhead frontman Lemmy (“His deep interest in Third Reich memorabilia and his Nazi-inspired clothing … came across as the misguided rationalisations of an overindulged child") and the right-wing British punk band Skrewdriver, whose lead singer, Ian Stewart Donaldson, went on to form the band Blood & Honour (“a name taken from the motto inscribed on Hitler Youth-issued daggers: Blut und Ehre”). There are many more examples of musicians who, writes the author, “explicitly supported Nazi beliefs… who appropriated Nazi imagery without clear political alignment", or “whose work actively opposes fascist ideas”, but, wisely, he leaves any moral judgment to the discretion of the reader.
Nightlife has a way of taking the temperature of a community, a scene that, due to a common mindset, people can buy into for a short but pivotal time without fear of being fleeced. In 1979, a second World War-themed wine bar in London’s Covent Garden became one of the most important focal points of UK youth culture since The Beatles returned to Liverpool from Hamburg more than 15 years earlier.
One of the club’s cultural minders, Robert Elms, outlines not only the club itself but also what it meant and how influential it was, in Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s (Faber, £20). It is undoubtedly an insider’s story. Rising out of the disappointing end days of punk, the idea behind Blitz started as a one-night (Tuesday) celebration of David Bowie, and gradually took on a glittering life of its own to become a Ziggy-curated soundtrack of Kraftwerk, Roxy Music and other arty misfits, and a personalised decor that, writes Elms, “was daring and decadent, but also sweetly DIY, more dressing-up box than haute couture. You had to decide almost on the spot if you really wanted to be part of this scene, as it was clearly going to be a full-time job looking this preposterous.”
Elms chronicles the club’s unwitting rise to fame in a geezer-like manner, dropping well-known names like pistachio shells along the way. The picture he paints, however, is one rooted in the conservative working-class estates of suburban London, and of courageously finding the way from there to somewhat more affluent social circles. Equally, there is no viewing the era through rose-tinted glasses (Aids cast a “terrible shadow over the night”), but rather an understanding that the scene and its primary instigators became “a major catalyst for change, for the radical and the new”.
Those two words, “radical” and “new”, immediately spring to mind when it comes to Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop, by Elizabeth Alker (Faber, £20). Music fans with ears for the (supposedly) unconventional will already be familiar with how influential 20th-century classical music has been on pop and rock music, from musique concrète’s tape manipulation as used by The Beatles in the ‘60s to how minimalist composer Steve Reich’s piece Electric Counterpoint helped to inspire The Orb’s Alex Paterson to recontextualise club music in the ‘80s.
All of this is profuse grist to a productive mill. Lest one presumes, however, that wafer-thin theories are being stretched to snapping point, Alker provides ample, insightful evidence of creative connections that, as decades have passed, are now embedded in a lot of the music we listen to.
