What book are you reading?

[Clash Cadillac]

Down All the Days by Christy Brown (a clown around town)

[treadhead1944]

Just finished Making Money by Terry Pratchett.

[Eckhard]

Sounes, Howard: Fred and Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West

[Michaelo]

Just finished "There's A Lot Of Bubbly In Brazil" by Alan Brazil; An entertaining read. I hadn't realised he was a Celtic man.

[Mark_Wafc]

Les Dawson's secret notebooks; Tracy Dawson

[Eckhard]

I'm reading a book called The Shipwrecked Men by Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca.

Cabeça de Vaca a conquistador in the 1500s and sailed with around 600 other men from Castile to Cuba, then to Florida, and from Florida the men marched to Mexico City. They were the first white men to ever view the American Southwest. Yet, due to the poor leadership of Governor Pánfilo, only four men, including Cabeça de Vaca, survived.

You might want to try Neil Hanson's "Custom of the Sea" then. I found that pretty interesting.

[philipchevron]

I received both of these books for my Archive, but actually, I strongly recommend both of them.

77 Sulphate Strip by Barry Cain (Ovolo Books, 2007)

Barry Cain was a journalist on Record Mirror in 1977, a year which, in his own estimation, the future course of his life was set. He was a talented writer, noted as such not just by myself and Joe Strummer, but also people like Rat Scabies and John Lydon. Because he was not an NME or Creem scribe, and because the humourous rather than the intellectual tickled his fancy, he never "made it" to the inner sanctum of posey rock journalists, most of whom did not deserve their lofty reputation anyway. This book is a bitter-sweet reflection on how 1977 - that year, loomed over the decisions, the values, the choices - he made for the rest of his life. It is sprinkled with some of his writing for Record Mirror that year. It does not include the hilarious review of Thin Lizzy and The Radiators from Space at the Hammersmith Odeon in which Cain reversed the preeminence of the bands (I think Thin Lizzy went on second only because the Radiators fancied an early night or something), but it does include his touching eye-witness account of the show earlier that year in Dublin - the "saddest gig in the world" he rightly calls it - at which an 18 year old kid, Patrick Coultry, was murdered at a show headlined by The Radiators and also featuring the Undertones. While the NME sensationalised this the following week, putting grainy photos of the Radiators on the cover along with a gloomy, loaded, strapline - "At this punk gig a kid was stabbed to death" (my italics), Barry's wiser counsel prevailed in a more human, more factual account buried inside the same week's Record Mirror.

Also here is Barry's "shock horror" pseudo-expose of the Radiators painting the town red in Kassel, Germany, in October 1977, destroyed by the mangling of an uncaring sub-ed, an error which is, deliberately and entertainingly, carried over into its re-appearance here.

But the book is not just an exercise in navel-gazing and nostalgia. What makes this book truly great is how it connects the past to the present, through the perspective of anyone who he knew in 1977 who'll still talk to him in 2007, to wit, Rat Scabies, Hugh Cornwell and, amazingly enough, John Lydon. And yes, I'd have happily talked to Barry if he'd gotten in touch - I liked him - but I'm pretty sure my interview would be comparatively redundant when set alongside the saki-drenched 40-page chat with John Lydon at Marina Del Rey which comes at the end of the book. I doubt you'll ever read a better John Lydon interview or a more open and honest one. Without ever losing sight of his role as an entertainer, Lydon discusses his disabling childhood meningitis, his father's "Gyppo" background ("Not many people know that about the Paddies - their class structure is even worse than the English") and, well, just about anything that's important in this world. Cain chronicles the conversation with wit and empathy and insight and you get a strong sense of a real bond being forged - Lydon only agrees to talk to Cain because his lifelong football pal Rambo approves of him, which is good enough for John Lydon - and this is where the book comes into its own. The punks have grown up, they're all 50 plus, the writers, the publicists and the bands, and behind all the many acres of print spouting sanctimonious bullshit about them and their times, this is how they really are. They kept the life-lessons the punk experience helped them express, in a way that makes most of the Hippy baby-boomers look like envious children with their noses pressed up against the window.

This book made me laugh and cry for my own errors and follies as well as my own small triumphs and, above all, for the fact that I was right back in 1977 and I still am.

"What's this book called, anyway?" asks Lydon, as Cain starts to drive away from the encounter.

"77 Sulphate Strip", Cain tells him.

"What the fuck? Are you joking me? Is my life reduced to a dumb-arse cliché like that?"

"Fucking hell", he says, "I wish I'd thought of that."






The Show I'll Never Forget - 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience edited by Sean Manning (Da Capo, 2007)

Not a book of reviews so much as a collection of superior rock writing putting the selected shows into a cultural/historical context which both ennobles the shows and touches, like the Barry Cain book, some primitive but vital fan/musician connection. I'm still reading this, but so far, highlights include Irish poet Paul Muldoon on Horslips' final shows in Belfast (1980) and a post-rehab Jerry Stahl encountering David Bowie as a sort of post-modern guardian angel at a show in Los Angeles in 2004. In the same league (at least) is Robert Polito's account of a Pogues show in Boston in July 1986 in which he describes a phantasmagoria of Irish-America inj which the Pogues drink coca-cola at a Boston Red Sox game in the afternoon while all around us the bleachers are full of nutters half-drunk on near-beer, the Kennedy cousins Robert and John-John (present at the gig itself) are like totems of possibility and Polito's mate Kevin ["out of Southie via Harvard, Kevin was what my grandmother tagged "Black Irish", smart, ornery, and as homely as a scare poster for Father Damien's Hawaiian Islands leper colony - his face pimpled, scarred and swollen"] is bloodied but unbowed by the end of the show.

""Skeptical and rollicking, a carnival of Irishness and sardonic about Ireland, the Pogues at Metro that July night in 1986 mounted a fearsome majestic racket that disputed, even denied, every sentiment they celebrated. The only event I ever thought matched it was a St Patrick's Day program at the Boston Public Library when Seamus Heaney disdained to act the professional Irishman, defiantly reading only his darkest poems from North, and refusing to soften the cruxes of Irish politics."

[Jon]

just finished reading Carol Clerks book, it got a bit tough in the final couple of chapters but well worth the read.

The only books left in the unread pile are an indian cookbook and Harry Potter

[Shaz]

Just starting Sara Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas. This time out she's moved away from crime fiction and is exploring the state of modern America through a small town setting.

[Fionn MacCool]

'Luck & The Irish', got it for xmas

[Nate]

I read White Noise by Don DeLillo last week and it was amazing. I'm trying the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's three volume biography of Leon Trotsky. I can't remember the last time I read a biography so I have big hopes for this one.

[treadhead1944]

How the Irish Saved Civilization

[Sandyfromvancouver]

How the Dead Live - Will Self

[Shaz]

Crimini. An short story anthology of noir Italian crime fiction.

[Sandyfromvancouver]

I found How the Dead Live is laugh out loud funny, acutely accurate, insane, and contains a savage sense of justice and injustice. Self's writing has an intelligent humanity that he undermines with a mad misanthropy.

Should I post this purple prose? Yeah why not.