'I can't even touch the books you've read' - Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind
I reckon John Cooper Clarke's I Wanna Be Yours is a new entry to the top five, but the others, like those perennial punk faves in John Peel's All-time Top 50, are the same as they've been for ages. Yes, I'm talking about the Top Five Music Books You Always See In Charity Shops chart. The only chart that matters. So yeah, JCC's a new entry and I think the full top five is currently as follows:
1: Morrissey, Autobiography
2: John Peel, Margrave Of The Marshes
3: Keith Richards, Life
4: Peter Hook, The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Nightclub
5: John Cooper Clarke, I Wanna Be Yours
Full disclosure, I own (or at one time have owned) all five of these books. A year or two ago I got rid of the Keith Richards (back to a charity shop) when I yet again ran out of precious shelf space (Am I really going to read this? Er, no, c'mon! It's going ...) and the Peter Hook (blogged about here) is at my partner's house, but the others are here ...
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| JCC, Peel and Morrissey: a new supergroup whose debut album is picking up rave reviews |
Hmm, a rum bunch. But isn't that basically the way with music book publishing? Go into HMV these days and you'll see a rarely-changed selection of the "hit" music books - ones by David Hepworth and Jon Savage, and a sprinkling of safe "classics" like Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, Stephen Morris's three JD/NO books, usually something by John Lydon, Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace autobiography, etc etc. I guess it's all about the "market". What "sells", or is deemed to. Anyway, one of my (many) weaknesses is reading music books, many of which are - in truth - less than brilliant. It's surely not surprising that books about music often disappoint because, fundamentally, music isn't easy to write about. Music is best experienced - blasting out from your speakers or assailing your eardrums at a gig. Compared to this, writing stuff down about music is secondary. Which, of course, is a bit rich coming from me when I've been churning out posts on music for years. It's still true though. Another problem with a lot of music books is that they're written by (or ghost written for) musicians who frankly shouldn't be attempting to put together a book in the first place. They're clunky writers, they don't tell a story well and far too much is about them and their not-so-interesting lives. In general I'm assuming there's an over-supply of music books because publishers think they've got a reliable market, especially the middle-aged one which will snap up stuff on, eg Factory records, Madchester, the Sex Pistols, punk, Britpop, and - to slide into the books-in-supermarkets zone - biogs and autobiographies on just about anyone famous, eg the Gallagher brothers, Robbie Williams (another charity shop perennial), Elton John, David Bowie, George Michael, you name it. But though the publishers might indeed have a ready market I reckon a lot of these books are bought, stuck on shelves, left gathering dust for years, then quietly offloaded to a charity shop unread. A sad demise. And I know because I'm guilty of this too. Given there are apparently more than 600 million books sold in the UK every year (gulp) there are presumably vast quantities of books going unread. People being too ambitious with their book buying? A lot of unwanted presents bought by the terminally unimaginative? Certainly the charity shops are awash with books (they're awash with everything actually, consumerism eating itself to death ...). Which leads me back to my top five. Repulsed by Morrissey's long drift to the political far-right and aware of a lot of negativity around his vainglorious Penguin Classics book, I was on the point of reverse charity-shopping this the other week when I flipped it open to give it a quick test read. I happened to open it to a passage relating how Morrissey became acquainted with the artist-designer Linder Sterling. Shock-horror, it seemed really well-written. Oh no! Now I had to keep it (I've kept it). So the moral of this blog is ... er, well it's (1) that actually charity shops are great, being the junk piles-cum-treasure troves of a wildly out-of-control consumeristic society; (2) music books are generally mediocre and are no substitute for great music; and (3) you won't find the best music books in your average charity shop. Finally, here's my alternative top five - the Top Five Music Books You Won't Generally Find In Your Local Charity Shop:
Speaking of Nico - and just to show that when all is said and done I'm an incorrigible buyer/hoarder of books about music - in the space of the past week alone I've bought (in charity shops, where else) Jennifer Otter Bickerdike's Nico biography You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone, and Jon Savage's chunky 1966: The Year The Decade Exploded, largely on the strength of it having a longish chapter on the Velvet Underground. Hundreds more pages I may never read, more books that may stare out at me from the shelves shaming me until I stop pretending and take them down to the charity shop. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Anyway, if you see one of my music books in your local British Heart Foundation shop you probably don't have to worry about being like the character in the Bob Dylan song above, because it's a 50:50 chance I won't have read it anyway.
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