Punk-poet and rock icon Patti Smith doesn't think like the rest of us. Though she seems to spend much of her time alone, her headspace is peopled by beat writers, philosophers, academics and avant-gardists. Even when she sleeps, she's on a different plane – when was the last time you dreamt about early 20th century German geophysicist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener?
M Train (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is neither memoir nor autobiography, but an Orient Express ride through Smith's thoughts, ideas, dreams and preoccupations, stopping off at some offbeat places along the way, including the prison in French Guyana where Jean Genet was incarcerated, Frida Kahlo's casa in Mexico, and the house in Rockaway Beach in Queens where Smith moved into just before Hurricane Sandy hit. The book is illustrated by Smith's own offbeat polaroids.
She muses at length on coffee (her drug of choice), her favourite writers (Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Harumi Murakama’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles get much mention) and British and Scandinavian crime drama (she’s obsessed with The Killing). Music doesn’t get much of a look-in, but she does reminisce fondly about her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, who she still clearly misses 20 years after his death.
Rambling and poetic, this is one to read over a long afternoon in your favourite coffee-shop.
When Lou Reed died in 2013 aged 71 following a failed liver transplant, there was a rush to get out biographies of the man and his music. Notes From the Velvet Underground – The Life of Lou Reed by Howard Sounes (Doubleday, £20) claims to be the most significant of these, and the author has certainly done his research, delving into Reed's suburban childhood on Long Island, his high school years as a truculent teenager, his introduction to the seedy side of New York City via The Velvet Underground, and their unconventional entry into the music biz – as the house band for Andy Warhol's Factory, playing a dark, druggy style of rock totally at odds with the peace & love ethos of the 1960s.
The biography details his battles with Warhol and bandmate John Cale for control of the Velvets, and his solo success with the album Transformer helped by the production and makeup skills of David Bowie. There’s no attempt to sweeten the pill of Reed’s difficult personality, but Sounes also avoids painting him as a pantomime bad boy. Reed never reached megastar status, but he remains a formidable figure in rock history.
Calling your memoir I'll Never Write My Memoirs (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) is just the kind of contrary gesture you'd expect from pop-cultural icon Grace Jones. The woman who wowed Electric Picnic last September aged 67 (wearing little else but tribal body-paint) tells it all in her own provocative style to writer Paul Morley: her troubled childhood in Jamaica (she was known by her middle name, Beverly) under the thumb of an abusive guardian known as Mas P; how she rebelled against her strict religious upbringing by applying for a job as a Playboy bunny in Philadelphia; trying to make it as a model in New York and Paris in the 1970s; her disco ball years at Studio 54; and how she totally reshaped the 1980s with her androgynous, angular looks and musical mix of roots reggae, New Wave and French chanson.
A cast of fabulous characters sashays through the book, including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Issey Miyake, Jerry Hall, Jessica Lange, Debbie Harry, Timothy Leary and Dolph Lundgren, but none seems quite as colourful and out there as Ms Jones herself.
While Grace Jones was living it up in Studio 54, Bernard Sumner was trudging the grey streets of Salford, on his way to rehearse with his new band in a room above a local pub. Joy Division soon gained cult acclaim in their native Manchester and beyond, but it all came crashing down when the band's troubled singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself on the eve of a US tour.
The three remaining members renamed themselves New Order, and had a singing contest to decide who would take over as the frontman; Sumner was declared the winner. Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division and me (Corgi, €8.99) is Sumner's own account of his long career at the helm of two of the most influential bands in pop music (not to mention one half of Electronic with Johnny Marr). It's told in Sumner's down-to-earth northern-bloke style, with little pause for niceties: the downfall of Joy Division, the financial disasters of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub; the falling-out with bassist Peter Hook, the (separate) deaths of Factory boss Tony Wilson, producer Martin Hannett and manager Rob Gretton, and Sumner's own near-demise thanks to a gruelling tour and party schedule. "With all the moaning I've done in these pages about the stress, the pain and the financial crises, it's easy to overlook how much fun we had," he writes. OK, it's nearly all warts, but it will speak to the dour indie kid in you.
Allen Klein occupied a unique place in the annals of rock 'n' roll. He was financial manager for two of the world's biggest groups, and fell out spectacularly with both of them. Allen Klein: the Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll by Fred Goodman (Eamon Dolan, $27) details the life of this sharp, savvy New Yorker who traded on his ability to get the best deals for artists who felt they were being exploited by their record labels and concert promoters. His pitch, "I can get you a million", made bands' ears prick up, and when he took over the financial affairs of The Rolling Stones in 1965, the band could finally live like the rock stars they'd become. Klein made a lot of the deals stack up in his own favour, too, which rankled with many of his clients; when he bought the rights to half of the Stones' royalties, it enraged Jagger & co, who saw it as a conflict of interest. The Verve weren't too happy, either, having to hand Klein all their royalties for their biggest hit, Bittersweet Symphony, which sampled a Stones song.
Klein had courted The Beatles since the early days, and they finally asked him to come in and sort out the financial mess of their Apple label, but McCartney was dead set against this smooth-talking American – so it wasn’t just Yoko who put a wedge between the members of the Fab Four.
The book tells the story by numbers: Goodman has all the figures down to the last cent, and watching the amounts stack up page after page is strangely compelling. Musicians today will look on in envy at what bands could earn from record sales and royalties back in the day.
Pop music has splintered into so many sub-genres, styles and tribes, it's a brave writer who'll attempt to cover pop's entire history in one volume. Yeah Yeah Yeah – the Story of Modern Pop by Bob Stanley (Faber & Faber £20) is an essential doorstop for any music-loving household. Stanley has his own pop band, Saint Etienne, but here he concentrates on the 999,999 other artists, bands, duos, novelty singers and one-hit-wonders who have tripped through the pop charts since they first began to be compiled in 1952. Each chapter is a condensed gem of pop knowledge, as Stanley bites off a chunk of pop history and makes it not only digestible, but deliciously entertaining. He joins the dots between seemingly unrelated musical events, and puts even the most inconsequential chart bottom-feeder into wider context. One to pick up and flick through at random to refresh your passion for pop.
