Recommendsday: Books about bands

Last week I asked you for recommendations for romances featuring musicians, so in return this week, I’m recommending you some books about bands or musicians – nb these are not romance recommendations!

Lets go with Fiction first. Obviously, if you haven’t read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six already, do go and read that. If you’ve been under a rock, this is a fake oral history telling the story of a rock band who break up right at the height of their fame. Think Fleetwood Mac style dramas but supercharged. I really liked it – and the audiobook is also really good too – it really enters the spirit of the oral history format of the book by having a full cast and it’s great. The adaptation is out on Amazon Prime now – I still need to watch it but life has been too busy for me to get to it so far.

If you’ve already read Daisy Jones and want another fake oral history of a band, then you could try The Final Revival of Opal and Nev* by Dawnie Walton. The Opal and Nev of the title are a famous – or infamous – musical duo who are most known for an incident at a showcase that left one of their band members dead. It’s quite hard to explain the the structure – it’s an oral history of the band but it’s also the story of the writing of the oral history as the journalist writing it tries to make sense of the story she is hearing and how it fits into her own life because she has a personal connection to the story. The oral history device means it is easy to read in bite sized chunks – which is what I did because it’s more serious than my brain could cope with at some times but don’t let that make you think that’s it’s not good, because it is. Because it’s an oral history it may draw comparisons with Daisy Jones and the Six but they’re actually very different in a lotof other ways – but both worth reading.

I mentioned it in a quick reviews last year – but Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You has the mum of a fan of the biggest boyband in the world falling for one of band members. If you told me it had started out as One Direction fan fic, I would have believed you, and I’m going to say again that it didn’t really work for me and it is not a romance by the definition of the genre, but it has been lots of people’s thing, and the adaptation is coming to Amazon Prime in the not too distant future, starring Anne Hathaway as the mum.

Amore recent book about a musician – rather than a band – is The Unsinkable Greta James, which was a book of the week last year and I actually saw it in paperback in a store the other day. It’s about an indie musician who is struggling after the death of her mum and goes with her dad on the holiday of a lifetime her parents were meant to be taking together.

And is it cheating to suggest the Vinyl Detective series? I feel like it might be, but I’m going to anyway – each book is about a different musical genre, centring on one band’s record and usually featuring at least one member of the band.

In the non-fiction side of things, I’ve mentioned it so many times now, but Viv Albertine’s first memoir, Clothes, Clothes Clothes. Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read – not just one of the best ones by a musician. It’s raw and unflinching and I can’t believe it’s nearly 10 years old. She has written another book since which I keep meaning to getting around to buying. It’s hard to be as brutally honest as Viv Albertine is, but the next closest I’ve read is Martha Wainright’s Stories I Might Regret Telling You, which was of course a Book of the Week last year and which is now out in paperback so should be reasonably easy to get hold of.

And that’s your lot for today – Happy Reading!