Essential Music Memoirs
"This is non-fiction with feeling. It's incredibly cool and it's as close as you'll get to time travel for a tenner. Hold it tight enough and you'll swear it has a heartbeat."
Words by Sophie Diver, Rough Trade Nottingham
Equally as essential and rewarding as our best new music, we are proud to foster a keen interest in printed works, with the 'memoir genre' a regular occurrence amongst our best new reads at Rough Trade.
From revealing the lives behind the lyrics of cult figures like Mark Lanegan or Patti Smith (in their own words), the enlightening insight of music industry figures such as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell or Creations Records founder Alan McGee, or a part autobiographical, part ghostwriter memoirs, such as the well put together The Beautiful Ones, a project delving into Prince's private archives. It would take a long, long list to really reflect on the booming nature of music memoirs and just how much is covered by the literary genre. Here to take an initial deep dive is one of our well-read staffers, poet and writer Sophie Diver, who presents a list of personalised recommendations of the memoir format to get stuck into. (Look out for our follow-up piece with further memoir recommendations for the insatiable bookworms out there).
Mark Lanegan, Sinéad O'Connor, Damo Suzuki, Patti Smith, Cosey Fanny Tutti, and more. Rough Trade Nottingham's Sophie Diver shares a selection of 12 must-read memoirs for music lovers.
Music memoirs are odd, aren't they? Sometimes it’s like unearthing treasure, a chance to crack open an idol’s creativity and join them for those moments. Other times, they’re self-indulgent, name-dropping, score-settling activities. Regardless, for a few hundred pages we’re backstage with the opportunity to revisit some incredible music. Here are twelve that have stuck with me over the years.
Patti Smith - Just Kids
Reading Patti Smith's writing is the literary equivalent of a black and white photograph found between the pages of an old library book. It's black coffee and a cigarette savoured from a coffee shop’s water-ringed, dumpster-salvaged table. Just Kids is a raw account of 1970s New York, the young creative NY scene - and Smith's fragile and poignant relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. This is non-fiction with feeling. It's incredibly cool and it's as close as you'll get to time travel for a tenner. Hold it tight enough and you'll swear it has a heartbeat.
Debbie Harry - Face It
If Patti Smith’s writing is the photograph, Debbie Harry’s is the sudden burst of the flashbulb. Face It highlights a life spent facing it, literally, from coming to terms with her adoption to misogyny in the music industry. Harry recalls the trauma of sexual abuse and stalking with the nonchalance of a shopping list and the touring misdemeanours of Bowie and Iggy read like a mascara-leaden eye roll. Face It so encapsulates the energy of 1970s NYC it would hail a cab if it could. Debbie Harry’s memoir is a rolodex of New York cool in longform; a carousel blurring together grit and glamour.
Viv Albertine - Clothes, Music, Boys
‘Some names have been changed to protect the guilty’...now that’s an introduction! Here’s the OG trailblazer for the typical girl. Clothes, Music, Boys details Albertine’s evolution into the girl she wished she’d seen up there on the stage at all those messy early punk shows. The book’s title tells you exactly what to expect: this is the fashion, the punk scene and the boys in the bands along the way. The energy of Britain's young, disillusioned and hungry crackles through the pages like an amp with a loose connection and her band The Slits were there wading through the feedback with the best of them. What’s more, it’s also a memoir of identity and womanhood that showcases Albertine’s talents as a beautifully honest writer.
Cosey Fanni Tutti - Art Sex Music
Art Sex Music tells of Cosey’s creative defiance of social norms through her work with COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey and beyond. She writes with the same vigour that she pursues in her art: unabashed and unflinching. Never one to wilt under scrutiny and judgement, Cosey Fanni Tutti recounts her difficult history with fellow TG member Genesis P-Orridge with a raw honesty. Art Sex Music is a testimony to living authentically, pushing boundaries and navigating a thorny world with thornier relationships.
Mark E. Smith - Renegade
Renegade is the paperback embodiment of the bloke in your local spouting off over the gargle of the fruit machine. You’re going to want to pull up a stool and buy the man his next pint. Mark E. Smith’s directory of graft and gripes includes Tony Wilson, Bob Geldof, Lloyd Grossman, football, celebrity and many, many more (no one is safe) through the growling tone of your grumpy uncle. His tributes to his ex-bandmates are as palatable as a sour pint; no surprises there, then. There’ll never be another MES, and Renegade is the liner notes to an eccentric’s life lived at his own rhythm (I’m sure Simon Wolstencroft, Paul Hanely etc etc can attest to that).
Kim Gordon - Girl in a Band
We arrive at the end; it’s 2011 and Kim Gordon is looking out from a stage in São Paulo, playing Sonic Youth’s last ever gig. What unfurls is an unconventional life steeped in art and experimentation. From ‘faux-hippie’ Cali-girl to New York No Wave outsider, Gordon pulled herself up to the table and ATE. What’s inescapable is her relationship with bandmate and ex-husband Thurston Moore, which she confronts with crushing detail. Here we hold the answer to the question Kim Gordon’s been asked the most: what’s it like to be a girl in a band? The answer is boldly sincere, insightful, and super cool (of course).
Baxter Dury - Chaise Longue
When your dad was as unfiltered as Ian Dury was - this is the memoir you write: creatively compact and superbly scrappy. Chaise Longue follows Dury’s early life in the same ominous way his 6ft 7 minder did (nicknamed the ‘Sulphate Strangler’, no less). His is an artistic upbringing complete with jazz records, drugs and chaotic fatherly feedback. Baxter Dury spills the stories of West London bohemia, kaleidoscopically colourful characters and questionable parenting. No one crafts a moment in time, a vivid vignette like the Durys do and Chaise Longue is a wild, energetic scramble of them.
Sinéad O'Connor - Rememberings
Hers was a life everyone and their Nan had an opinion on. Rememberings gave O’Connor a chance to unpick a tapestry so tightly woven with media misconception and misguided furore. What’s more, she untangled her impassioned history into the most delicate, contemplative little chapters. It’s an incredibly considered reflection on family, religion and success. Rememberings is a neighbourhood cat on its back, its fragility exposed but guarded, the protective claws never firmly away. O’Connor told the story she wanted to tell; delicate, diplomatic and meditative.
Damo Suzuki - I Am Damo Suzuki
With a title ready-made courtesy of Manchester’s aforementioned terminal grouch, you have to deliver like Damo. Co-authored with Paul Wood and told with additional contributions from life-long collaborators and friends, Suzuki tells of growing up in Japan in the long, dark shadow of WWII, fronting krautrock juggernauts Can for three genre-bending, pioneering years and creating the Damo Suzuki Network, rooted in improvisation. This memoir reflects the free spirit and quiet nature of Suzuki perfectly. Here are the musings and reflections of a counterculture oracle. Pay attention.
Carrie Brownstein - Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
Now here’s a genuine memoir that truly reveals the personality behind the persona. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is strangely relatable for all those awkward nerdy girls (who me? Course not!) who found themselves through music. Brownstein tells of life in riot grrrl band Sleater Kinney and fights with anxiety, insecurity and misogyny. There is a witty straightforwardness to the book that avoids the early pages baring all on a therapist’s couch. For her, this isn’t the place to figure it out and that shows in her survivalist approach to her formative years - but she makes up for it in her vivid recollections. You can smell Seattle in these pages. Brownstein’s memoir reminds you these musicians we hear on our turntables are human and just as complicated and confused as the rest of us. I knew it!
Bernard Sumner - Chapter and Verse
Chapter and Verse begins quietly, starting with Sumner’s upbringing by his grandparents and disabled mother. It slowly reveals a life defined by music like a high contrast Kevin Cummins shot. From dusting off a guitar after that Sex Pistols gig in 1976, Joy Division emerged and a life in two of the most defining British bands began. Chapter and Verse is a story of friendship brought to the brink and addresses the Hooky drama as dutifully as ticking off a to-do list. Sumner’s story about taking a bag of vomit through airport security says it all: here’s a neatly packaged tale swiftly told, guts and all.
Mark Lanegan - Sing Backwards and Weep
Sing Backwards and Weep is honesty served neat. Lanegan pulled his story out at the roots and let the dirt fall straight on the page. He recounts life in the Seattle scene with the Screaming Trees as many around him fell tragically and achingly early, including Cobain and Hole’s Kristen Pfaff. Addiction is as ever-present here as your bookmark. Lanegan’s struggles are recalled in such gut-winding detail, but there’s also a self-awareness that softens the hardest stories. He recounts a life spent teetering on the edge of the pavement, regrets growing furiously through the cracks. A bruised and beautiful memoir.
Further Reading...
The TBR pile is eternal and there are many I’ve loved and left off this list, notable mentions include:
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Tenement Kid by Bobby Gillespie, Sonic Life by Thurston Moore, Set the Boy Free by Johnny Marr, The Rise, The Fall and The Rise by Brix Smith Start and Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn. Happy reading x