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Books about music: From a frontman’s anxiety to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s honesty

Paul Morley is verbose on Tony Wilson; Kodaline singer Steve Garrigan bares his soul

Steve Garrigan of Kodaline. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Tony Clayton-Lea's face
Tony Clayton-Lea
Sun Nov 7 2021 - 06:00

Any fan with even scant knowledge of Manchester's crucial music scene will know the name of Tony Wilson, the man behind Factory Records, which bestowed to the world the music of (among many others) Joy Division. From Manchester with Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson (Faber & Faber, £20), is the book that Paul Morley, a long-established cultural critic, was born to write. Unfortunately, Morley's usual prolix writing style goes into overdrive, regularly using several metaphors where one would suffice ("always making a move, here, there and over there, always a few moves ahead, one step beyond … ").

This noted, he also gets under the skin of his subject (“a hyperactive, hedonistic master of setting things in motion … just to see what would happen”). But it’s a real chore wading through the quicksand of rambling prose to get to the heart of it.

What with all the fripperies and faux glamour of rock music, outside of some academic texts little has been written about its therapeutic values. The Healing Power of Singing, by Emm Gryner (ECW Press, €15), bridges that notable gap by being part "vocal health tips" and "stories from the tour bus".

Fans of David Bowie will know Gryner as  part of his touring band in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and if that’s all you want to read then head straight to chapter nine, which has most of the core details. You would be missing out, however, on other absorbing chapters focusing on Gryner’s dealings with an often perplexing music industry and aspects of her private life. It’s a salutary read from an assertive musician and mother who has, against no small odds, carved out an independent life, both creatively and personally.

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Another memoir provides more insights into the pressures of life in the music industry is provided by another memoir. High Hopes: Making Music, Losing My Way, Learning to Live (Hachette Ireland, £15.99) is by Steve Garrigan, lead singer of Kodaline, one of Ireland's most successful pop-rock bands of the past 10 years. When he's on stage he looks the part, but here he reveals his anxiety, panic attacks and depression. It's a remarkably honest book by a quiet and unassuming public figure, but the sincerity of the writing is such that it firmly anchors the tales of woe.

Garrigan tracks the band’s pre-success days (playing midday gigs for a local scouts group in Co Mayo) to fully arrived status (headlining Dublin’s 3Arena) with modesty and humour that draws you in. Simultaneously, he smartly underlines the action with “be careful what you wish for” home truths about how success and degrees of fame affected his mental health.

As origin stories go, The First 21 by Nikki Sixx (Constable, £20) is a cracking read. It seems not all that glitters is gold, as we read about the man born Franklin Carlton Serafino Feranna jnr and his eventual transformation into Nikki Sixx, bass player for American glam/punk/metal band Mötley Crüe. Feranna (who legally changed his name in 1980) has previously documented a later part of his life in 2007's The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star. This memoir outlines the lead-up to the formation of Mötley Crüe.

Zig-zagging from Idaho to Seattle to Los Angeles, Sixx graduated from numerous aspiring metal bands to eventually landing the Big Kahuna with Mötley Crüe. The result is a realistic, no-holds-barred story of how a once “unbelievably idiotic” goon from the sticks co-founded one of the best-selling metal acts in the world.

Mötley Crüe and hundreds of other music acts are part of a multibillion currency industry. Most of them began  in tiny venues playing to handfuls and graduated to performing in arenas. But how was the degree of transition facilitated? In Rock Concert: A High-Voltage History, from Elvis to Live Aid, by Mark Myers (Grove Press, £20), the history of live music is presented in informative chronological chunks. From churches to public spaces; from 1938's New York-based Carnival of Swing concert to Frank Sinatra's teenage fanbase in the 1940s; from club gigs in the early 1950s to The Beatles in the early-mid 1960s; from Woodstock in 1969 and Live Aid in 1985; from branding to amplification/lighting; from media coverage to ticketing, Myers and many industry commentators expertly ticks them off, one by one.

A solitary gripe: an appendix list of the best 50 live albums doesn’t include Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous. Seriously?

Before you think that Major Labels, by Kelefa Sanneh (Canongate, £20) is about blood-sucking, corporate-driven record company executives, it would be wise to read the subtitle: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. It may seem that New Yorker staff writer Sanneh is digging a trench to fall into by setting himself such an arguably restrictive task to focus on umbrella genres such as rock, pop, dance, R&B, country, hip-hop and punk.

Genres, Sanneh writes, “strengthen and proliferate … they endure even when it looks as if they’re dying out or blending together”. He makes a good case in a segmented book that focuses on the respective categories, but too often it comes across more like a skim of the surface than a deep dive.

The raison d'être of Spinning Plates: Music, Men, Motherhood and Me, by Sophie Ellis-Bextor (Coronet, £18) is, writes the pop star and podcaster, to outline amusing/serious details about "stuff that has happened to me and what it taught me". This she does – very insightfully. Whether Ellis-Bextor is ruminating on her parents' relationship ("I don't really have any memories of my parents happy together"), her early music career ("feeling high and dry by 20 was crap") and fame ("fun but it's sort of nothingy at its core"), the book is honest, ego-free and fully engaging.