The weirdness inspired by Elvis since his death has been extensively analysed by pop brainiacs, notably Greil Marcus. What the American philosophy teacher Reece brings to the party is a musically agnostic fascination with the followers of a god whose frailties have inspired as much devotion as his genius. Reece’s text — “Elvis is the King not despite the peanut butter and banana sandwiches but because of them” — is the sanest and wittiest summary yet of the whole bonkers phenomenon.
ROUGH TRADE
by Rob Young
Black Dog £19.95
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Founded in the wake of punk and, after a brush with bankruptcy in the 1990s, still a force 30 years later, Rough Trade is the British independent label with the longest and most turbulent story to tell. Young’s brisk account is complemented with great photographs of the Smiths, the Fall and many of Geoff Travis’s other inspired signings.
MY TAKE
by Gary Barlow
Bloomsbury £18.99
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Renowned as the slightly dull, rather podgy one who wrote the songs, Barlow supplies a surprisingly entertaining if sober account of the madness that was (and in comeback mode still is) Take That. Robbie Williams and manager Nigel Martin Smith may be the leading characters in the tale of the boy band who redefined pop in the 1990s, but Barlow makes an unfailingly reliable narrator.
DIRTY BLONDE: The Diaries of Courtney Love
Picador £20
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“Diaries” is not quite the word for these random jottings, song lyrics, notes to her band and ex-husband — and it rather disguises the fact that most of the book comprises photographs of Love and friends from babyhood to now. As relentlessly messy as its subject, Dirty Blonde is a page-turner that conveys most of what you need to know about this American punk Valkyrie.
THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PINK FLOYD
by Toby Manning
Penguin £9.99
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Amazingly, there hasn’t been a book before this one that has tried to tell the whole story of the Floyd, which makes Manning’s account of the most quarrelsome band ever to sell more than 100m albums all the more impressive. Concise and clearly organised in the Rough Guide house style, it beams light on everything from tricky, tormented Syd to the writs of the 1980s and last year’s Live 8 reunion.
WHITE BICYCLES Making Music in the 1960s
by Joe Boyd
Serpent’s Tail £11.99
This is the story of how a preppy, expat Harvard graduate came to be the prime mover of London’s underground scene in the 1960s, as well as the European head of the Elektra record label and mentor to, among others, the late Nick Drake. White Bicycles is as readable for Boyd’s pin-sharp observations on the Britain of 40 years ago as for its droll vignettes of the bands he tried to sign and produce. A miraculously fresh look at well-trodden territory.
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REDEMPTION SONG: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer
by Chris Salewicz
HarperCollins £20
Few rock stars lead lives that justify a biography as long as this, but the late Joe Strummer was a bigger character than most of his fans ever realised. The public-school educated son of a career diplomat, he became one of the iconic founders of punk rock, lived his 50 years in a storm of contradictions and died a folk hero. It’s all here.
THE LOST TRIBES OF POP
Goths, Folkies, iPod Twits and Other Musical Stereotypes
by Tom Cox
Portrait £9.99
Meet the Northern Soul Survivor, the Reggae Poser, the Lo-Fi Elitist and a few dozen more casualties of modernity as refracted through the spectrum of pop music. The beauty of these socio-fictional portraits lies in their myriad detail: it’s the odd corners of the lives of Rave Mums, Posh Hippies et al that fire Cox’s imagination as much as their record collections, concert habits and preferences in audio gear.
()THE PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ RECORDINGS
by Richard Cook and Brian Morton
Penguin £30
The only reference book of its kind, Cook and Morton’s critical survey of nearly 100 years of jazz records just gets bigger and better. Like the Bible, this eighth edition is written in a style that balances liveliness and authority, while betraying a discernible bias on the part of the authors. Theirs is a European perspective on an American musical genre, which is no bad thing given the way jazz has been developing recently.
ALWAYS MAGIC IN THE AIR The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
by Ken Emerson
Fourth Estate £15
A family snapshot of 14 of the songwriters whose work in a building in midtown Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s gave the likes of Elvis and Dionne Warwick something to sing about. What happened after the Beatles and Dylan made them partially redundant is a fascinating fragment of American pop history.
Top five
WHITE BICYCLES
by Joe Boyd
Serpent’s Tail £11.99
Boyd’s memoir of London’s 1960s underground is a miraculously fresh look at well-trodden territory
THE LOST TRIBES OF POP
by Tom Cox
Portrait £9.99
Imaginative and detailed portraits of every pop type from the Northern Soul Survivor to the Reggae Poser
REDEMPTION SONG
by Chris Salewicz
HarperCollins £20
Lively biography of the Clash’s Joe Strummer, the public-school boy who became an icon of punk rock
ELVIS RELIGION
by Gregory L Reece
IB Taurus £10.99
The sanest and wittiest summary yet of the worldwide phenomenon of Elvis worship
THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PINK FLOYD
by Toby Manning
Penguin £9.99
The whole story of the Floyd, told for the first time in this concise, clearly organised guide
Bestsellers
1 Too Much, Too Young by Kerry Katona (Ebury) 63,338
2 My Take by Gary Barlow (Bloomsbury) 34,532
3 All About Us: My Story by Peter Andre (John Blake) 18,537
4 Margrave of the Marshes by John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft (Bantam Press) 17,936
5 Growing Pains by Billie Piper (Hodder) 17,341
Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 or www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
All bestsellers lists prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/06-11/11/06