Simon Napier-Bell

I chanced on this in an Edinburgh charity bookshop and a rattling good read it is too. Simon Napier-Bell’s history of the the British music business, from colourful Soho coffee bar kings in the fifties to anonymous downloads in the digital age, is gossipy, sardonic, unpretentious, perceptive, and very funny. His narrative voice is very much that of the world-weary music biz insider who’s seen it all and done most of it. His own story, as manager of Marc Bolan, John’s Children, the Yardbirds, Japan and Wham!, is woven into the larger history. And how could anyone not warm to a man who describes Duran Duran as ‘a tribute to marketing - a triumph of packaging over substance’, and says of Spandau Ballet, ‘their speciality was intellectual bullshit’.

If this book has anything as highfalutin as a thesis it’s that the music business was founded on three key principles: money, sex and drugs. He’s very good on how changes in drug fashions over the years shaped the changing sound of the music (psychedelia/acid, punk/speed, house/ecstasy) and on the central influence of gay men and gay culture on British pop music. Camp and androgyny were perhaps Britain’s unique contributions to pop (though Little Richard might have something to say about that).

There are tales of chart rigging and dodgy deals and, above all, of young men behaving badly. In the sixties and seventies before pop grew up, or more accurately became so over-managed that there was nothing left to listen to except the white noise of market research, bad behaviour was not so much tolerated in the record industry as obligatory. The more anarchic, anti-establishment, or just plain obnoxious you were, the more successful, respected, famous and, most importantly, rich you became. The music business plundered our secret desires and sold them back to us artfully packaged. As Napier-Bell observes: ‘at the heart of the pop dream is the sound of a cash register’.… (lisätietoja)

I love books giving 'insider' views on the music industry. Autobios don't really do it well as good as they are as people, especially stars, are never going to really compromise themselves while they're still alive...well, except for that book by Ozzy! What a fucken hoot that was!! But in essence a lot I have read have been good without being anything startling.

But then I read Mick Wall's Paranoid which not only freaked me right out it set the rules straight on how to tell it 'like it is'. And this book is just the same, if not as shocking.

Simon Napier-Bell (SNB for short) is a manager in the music industry and has, amongst others managed Wham! and The Yardbirds...for those youngies out there, Wham! were a duo from the 80s responsible for crap music and wanking in toilets, and for those a bit older but still younger than me, The Yardbirds were a shit hot band in the 60s who eventually became Led Zep...without SNB.

This book gives an insight from the 50s through to the end of the millennium the rise and rise of British music and how it evolved over 40-odd years not by fashions, popularity or even demand, but by that staple diet of all rockers, drugs.

Some of what SNB mentions will shock you, some of it will amaze you, but all in all the book will be a great reference for trivia and subject matter about some of music's biggest stars. Some stories really stand out; Keith Moon and his coprophilia (I had to look it up too), Jimmy Page doing drugs in the toilet with tranvestities, Boy George and his battle with his boyfriend, the money artists were, or in most cases weren't making due to dodgy deals...there is a story a minute and all of them are worth reading.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes a bit of gossip, however towards the end the factual analysis of the industry was a bit of a bore, anti-climatic if you will considering the content before it. And remembering this book is about 10 years old that analysis is dated and null and void considering what we know now...

Get it.… (lisätietoja)