I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
I grew up in south-west London, and still live here.
My formative years were spent going to rock gigs in local clubs, pubs, and colleges, when bands like Genesis, Black Sabbath, the Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd were still playing in small venues. Queen’s Brian May went to my school, as did half of the Yardbirds.
This book reflects that era, particularly the amazing goings-on at Eel Pie Island in Twickenham, where gigs were held in a crumbling hotel infested with hippies and other ne’er-do-wells… including me and some of my closest friends.
A Subversive History of Music is not just fascinating, but scholarly, thought-provoking, and accessible.
I’ve always believed that music springs from the least expected sources, most of them “unofficial”, and Gioia seems to agree. The central idea is this: musical innovation never springs from society’s officially approved sources, but from its despised outsiders, those with little or no power in everyday life – women, black people, young people – who develop their ideas in isolation from the mainstream.
Very often they live in port cities like New Orleans or Liverpool, which are flooded with influences from elsewhere.
The phrase "music history" likely summons up images of long-dead composers, smug men in wigs and waistcoats, and people dancing without touching. In Music: A Subversive History, Gioia responds to the false notions that undergird this tedium. Traditional histories of music, Gioia contents, downplay those elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational-its deep connections to sexuality, magic, trance and alternative mind states, healing, social control, generational conflict, political unrest, even violence and murder. They suppress the stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact,…
You thought you knew everything there was to know about The Beatles. I thought I did. I was wrong.
Craig Brown somehow manages to tell a very familiar story with details that either you never knew or had forgotten. He isn’t scraping the barrel: the book is full of excellent stories about the Fab Four, and sheds new light on where the band came from and where they ended up. It’s more than 600 pages long, and beautifully written, but a very easy read.
SHORTLISTED for the Baillie Gifford Prize's 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020
A Spectator Book of the Year * A Times Book of the Year * A Telegraph Book of the Year * A Sunday Times Book of the Year
From the award-winning author of Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret comes a fascinating, hilarious, kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four.
John Updike compared them to 'the sun coming out on an Easter morning'. Bob Dylan introduced them to drugs. The Duchess of Windsor adored them. Noel Coward despised them. JRR Tolkien…
When I was growing up, the fabled 1969 Woodstock music festival was a byword for the alternative drop-out culture of hippiedom then at its height.
Even today, people remember it and the town that gave it its name (although it's actually located 40 miles from the site of the festival). What’s perhaps less well known is that Woodstock first became Hippie Central several years before, after Bob Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman moved there, and it continued to attract musicians and artists long afterwards.
This book tells an often shocking tale of excess – drink, drugs, and sexual shenanigans. (And incidentally, Donald Fagen now divides his time between Woodstock and New York.)
Think "Woodstock" and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock-the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident-was already a key location in the '60s rock landscape. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns re-creates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, scheming…
Four years old and homeless, William Walters boarded one of the last American Orphan Trains in 1930 and embarked on an astonishing quest through nine decades of U.S. and world history.
For 75 years, the Orphan Trains had transported 250,000 children from the streets and orphanages of the East Coast…
I make no apology for including this immense and important work. So much of the music I love originated with the kidnapping of black people from Africa.
This book shows how not merely the music of Africa but whole swathes of culture now considered “American” were imported along with the slaves. How did they cope with being ripped from their homeland, transported across the Atlantic in chains, and forced to work in the fields of an alien land?
Levine lays it all out, including everything from Black religion to Black comedy, and despite what you might think, it’s a real page-turner.
When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts-work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book…
Nightfly tells the story behind one of rock’s most creative and enigmatic stars. Fagen wrote many hits over the years, both in his long partnership with Walter Becker in Steely Dan and as a solo artist. Despite a reputation for sarcasm and deliberate obscurity, he is one of the most gifted artists in the history of rock music. This book lifts the veil to explain his complex music, his mysterious lyrics, and the man himself.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…
Brother. Do. You. Love. Me. is a true story of brotherly love overcoming all. Reuben, who has Down's syndrome, was trapped in a care home during the pandemic, spiralling deeper into a non-verbal depression. From isolation and in desperation, he sent his older brother Manni a text, "brother. do. you.…
