Thurston Moore relives the early days of Sonic Youth
Reminiscing about his many friends and colleagues in the 1970s, Moore even finds good things to say about the Dead Boys and Sid Vicious
A mystifying miscellany
Most of the 66 songs he discusses in a collection of meditative essays date from the late 1940s to the advent of punk – a movement that evidently passed him by
Nonny nonny no
As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors…
More him than her
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Only half the story
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I…
A real wild child
Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the…
He shall not grow old
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
Joy Division was an all too short-lived joy
Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire,…
The sound of silence that echoes round Paul Simon
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble choosing the jacket cover of Robert Hilburn’s authorised biography of Paul Simon…
The vibrant tradition of English folk song
After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s…
