New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody write about pop music.” Or so it has seemed in 2016. This has been the year of the musician memoir, the music journalist’s memoir, the year of the tribute to departing pop principals (goodbye Bowie, farewell Prince), the year, in short, when pop’s past became publishing’s present. If Robin Scott was to re-release M’s glorious 1979 single Pop Muzik he could be forgiven for tweaking the lyric to recognise that.
These days the baby boomer generation and Gen Xers may no longer know what’s No1 in the charts (at the time of writing it’s Clean Bandit with Rockabye; and, yes, I had to look that up), but, if publishers are to be believed, there is always a corner of punk, post-punk, hip hop or disco history that they still want to know more about. From the 1960s (this year has seen biographies from two Beach Boys alone) to the 21st-century Grime scene, whatever you are into there’s a book for it.
But how do you navigate your way through all these words? How do you sort the candid memoir from the cash-in quickie? That’s where we come in. What follows is a run-down of the best, the most outrageous and even the most considered music books of the year. Consider it a public service.


The Best-Selling Memoir that’s Totally Worth Your Time
Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen
Simon & Schuster, £20

“At night I’d switch off the lights and drift away with Roy Orbison, Phil Spector or Duane Eddy lullabying me to dreamland. These records now spoke to me in a way most late-sixties and early-seventies rock music failed to. Love, work, sex and fun.”

In one way this is much, much better than it needed to be. Springsteen’s name on the cover ensures its availability at a knockdown price at your local supermarket and its presence in the bestseller lists. But maybe spurred on by the example of Dylan’s Chronicles, Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Keith Richards’s Life, America’s premier rock star has turned out a powerful, candid and revelatory memoir that – the odd stylistic tic apart (what’s with all the capitals?) – is a match for his music.
The headline stories from the book have been Springsteen’s battle with depression. But he’s just as open about his difficult relationship with his father and with the emotional control freakery that distorted his relations with the women in his life for far too long.
And it’s funny, too. Writing about his bandana and muscle look for the Born in the USA tour in 1984 he says, “Looking back on these photos now, I look … gay.”


The Slightly Disappointing Autobiography by a Godlike Genius
Set the Boy Free, Johnny Marr
Century, £20

“I thought about the new band name for a minute and it sounded like a family, and I liked how simple it was, then I thought about it some more and decided that it was great. The Smiths – it fitted.”

In truth I stopped reading Morrissey’s autobiography after 100 pages. Not because I didn’t like it. The opposite in fact. I just didn’t want the power of those pages soured by the poison I knew was to follow. There’s no such worries with Johnny Marr’s account of the greatest band there ever was (this is not up for debate) and beyond. It reflect its author’s essential sanity and decency. Sanity and decency don’t always lend themselves to entertainment, unfortunately.
Still, this is salutary reminder of just how young The Smiths were in their prime and how much landed on Marr’s shoulders during the band’s short golden creative period. It is also in passing a reminder of the guitarist’s offhand casual brilliance. One Saturday he wrote the tunes for William It Was Really Nothing, and Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want and then on the Sunday he knocked out How Soon is Now. What did you do last weekend?


The Most Entertainingly Wrong-Headed Music Book of the Year
1971: Never a Dull Moment
David Hepworth
Bantam Press, £20

“Apart from the music, Rod Stewart projected back to the music-buying public two great British passions which had never really been significant in pop music before: football and drinking.”

The former editor of Smash Hits and The Word has written an elegant, waspish account of a year in music that he claims was the greatest in pop history. The fact that he was 21 in 1971 is probably not coincidental.
Of course his central thesis is incorrect (I’d go for 1981 myself, but then again I was born a decade and a bit after Hepworth). Even so, this is an entertaining retro vision of pop at the start of the 1970s. Using a month-by-month structure Hepworth wraps the stories of Carole King, Nick Drake, David Bowie et al into a narrative of social and technological change. The result is a very readable book that’s a pleasure to argue with.

The Book That Repackages Music Journalism’s Past Glories

Reckless Daughter: A Joni Mitchell Anthology

Edited by Barney Hoskins

Constable, £20

“Well, they try to tie you to a time whether you’re tied to a time or not. Like I’ve seen recently, ‘that folk singer from the 60s,’ I haven’t been a folk singer since 1964 …”

This compilation of articles drawing on Rock’s Back Pages website gathers together reviews and interviews stretching back as far as 1968 to tell the story of the Canadian singer-songwriter. As such it’s a partial and rather bitty narrative and it suffers from having as high an opinion of Mitchell as she has of herself. (Not that either the journalists or the artist are wrong of course. If anything her talent has been too often undersold.)

What’s really lacking, though, is a little more grit and vinegar. An article that takes a contrary position might have geed things up a little.

The Book that Reminds us Pop is Not Just a 20th-Century Phenomenon

This is Grime

Hattie Collins & Olivia Rose

Hodder & Stoughton, £25

“We were writing to escape. If you listen deep into the lyrics, there’s probably a lot of cries for help in there.”

Unless you’re after a picture book about One Direction, Little Mix or Taylor Swift, it can be difficult to find any reflection of the current music scene on the bookshelves. So Hattie Collins’s oral history of Grime, accompanied by Olivia Rose’s suitably gritty black-and-white photographs, has a rare sense of contemporaneity about it. It’s also that rare thing in this corner of publishing, a book about a music scene that hasn’t been celebrated to death.

The opposite if anything. Grime, the East London child of Jungle and Garage would eventually give us Dizzee Rascal and this year’s Mercury Music Prizewinner Skepta. But it remains unlauded in the wider culture. Far be in from us to suggest that might have something to do with the fact that it’s a black British thing.

The problem with the book’s first-person narrative approach is that it it’s hard for the outsider to get a grip on the context here, however. This is a proudly insider take on the subject that is in the end too insidery to really illuminate the story. Newcomers probably shouldn’t start here. But if you do know your Lethal Bizzle from your Wretch 32 …

The Book that Celebrates Hip Hop Past and Present

Hip Hop Raised Me

DJ Semtex

Thames and Hudson, £40

“Obama recognises the power of hip hop. On his first date with Michelle, the pair watched Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, a film that started and finished with Public Enemy’s Fight the Power.”

Next to Grime, hip hop is now in its pipe and slipper years. Or at least old enough to qualify for a hefty, high-end visual summary from high-end publisher Thames & Hudson. As well as a foreword from Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and a history of the form from the author DJ Semtex, it contains more than 1000 images from hip hop’s history, stretching from party flyers from the late 1970s to shots of Kendrick Lamar and the Odd Future collective in the present day, and taking in record covers and publicity shots of everyone in between.

More pictures than words, the book isn’t really in a position to discuss the chewier issues that have surrounded hip hop: questions of glamorising violence, bling culture and the sexual objectification of women (though Niki Minaj’s posterior does play a prominent role in the visuals).

That said, the author’s introduction offers an impassioned personal account of how hip hop was instrumental in his own life and at their best there’s a cartoony vibrancy to hip hop visuals – whether it be Tribe Called Quest jumping around against comic book backgrounds or L’il Kim’s panto lubriciousness - that sing much more than the gritty, urban tropes that are the genre’s default visual setting.


The Photographic Book of the Year
Motown The Sound of Young America, Adam White with Barney Ales
Thames & Hudson, £39.95

“The world’s love of Motown was uniquely omnisexual: boys and girls adored it in equal measure.”

The Herald:

Well, this is a joy of a thing. A visual record of the greatest record label in pop history (again, not up for debate). Here are the Supremes meeting the Queen Mum in 1968. Here are Levi Stubbs, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye singing in a Detroit nightclub in 1964 (oh, for a time machine). Here are the Jackson Five mucking about in a photoshoot, Michael decked out in matching waistcoat and trousers and baby Afro, looking young and looking full of life. Here, in short, is the visual equivalent of a Temptations single. “And the band played on …”


The Personal History that takes in Perth, Leeds and Wigan Pier
Young Soul Rebels: A Personal History of Northern Soul, Stuart Cosgrove
Polygon, £14.99

Although small, Perth had talent. The first person I heard singing soul was a guy called Dave Amos, whose nickname Papa Stone conjured a delta bluesman plucking a box guitar by a parched cotton field; in fact he lived on a bleak council scheme called Hunters, which festered by old railway yards and had never seen the sun.”

Broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove’s return to writing about music in Detroit 67 gave us one of the music books of last year. While working on its sequel, he has now taken a side track via this personal history of northern soul, a story that takes in football (unsurprisingly), the Yorkshire Ripper and the miners’ strike. In doing so he reminds us that in pop’s narrative the consumer of music matters just as much as its creator.

The Book About David Bowie

A Portrait of Bowie

Introduction and Interviews by Brian Hiatt

Octopus, £25

“I was at the back of the club brushing my then waist-length hair. I’d just been offered a contract by the manager of the Yardbirds, and I was sitting there wondering whether to take it or not. David took the brush out of my hand and carried on brushing and said, ‘Can I come home with you tonight?’ And I said ‘Yes.’”

Since his death in January Bowie has been haunting pop. An absent presence. The lost leader. There have been any number of books extolling his virtues. Everyone from music journalists to his 1968 landlady and lover Mary Finnigan have given us their versions of David. (Finnigan’s - Psychedelic Suburbia – David Bowie and the Beckenham Arts Lab – is quite sweet).

None of them though feel as if they have found any new way to talk about Bowie. Maybe we need some time and distance for that. We need the ghost to fade so we can have a better sense of the space he once filled.

In the meantime Hiatt’s book of interviews with various Bowie collaborators – Dana Gillespie, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Nile Rogers all appear – is a fond enough tribute, helped by a fine choice of photographs and images. If it has the feel of an official, authorised book, and as such can seem a little slick and shallow. But everyone who speaks to Hiatt is clearly speaking from the heart. In that sense it’s a book about friendship and collaboration rather than rock myth. In Bowie’s case that might not be a bad thing.

The Book about Pop Stars Coming Out

Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache

Martin Aston

Constable, £25

“Despite Tom Robinson’s efforts, gay identity was still seen as something transgressive and subterranean. And for all punk rock’s challenge to conformity, it was mostly puritanical.”

Martin Aston’s brick of a book is an act of pop archealogy. It attempts to trace the story of gay and lesbian musicians through the 20th century, taking in “the pansy craze” of the 1930s and the queercore scene of the 1990s.

Aston’s research is exhaustive and at times his desire to tell you everything means that he moves on rather more quickly than you would like. He writes well about Jimmy Somerville, for example, but you do wonder what it cost the Glaswegian pop star to be so openly out and proud at a time of homophobia.

But you can’t question the effort Aston has put into this, bringing the story right up to date with a reminder that in Russia and in parts of Africa being gay or transgender can still be life-threatening.

The Book for the Pop Fan Who Wants to Get into Classical Music

Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through

Fiona Maddocks

Faber & Faber, £12.99

“Three male voices tell the sad story in squeezed, erotic dissonances which tighten like a mesh around the solo soprano … in a mix of taunting vengeance and wretched sorrow.”

There comes a time in every inquisitive pop fan’s life that the great ocean that is classical music swells up in front of them. How do you navigate your way through it though? Well, here is a great starting point.

The Observer’s Music Critic Fiona Maddocks has chosen (roughly) 100 pieces, ranging from medieval polyphony to modern-day minimalism, and written short, succinct and engaging essays about them. Each entry is a superbly marshalled mix of biography and musicology. She is particularly good at that impossible task of describing music (that’s her talking about Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa above). The result is, to quote the author writing on the 13th-century composer Perotin, “sprung and vital.”

The book that Proves even Conductors Gossip

Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

Haruki Murakami

Harvill Secker, £20

“Isn’t Berlioz difficult?”

“Difficult? His music is crazy! Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on either!”

Straying further into Michael Tumelty territory, here is the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami in conversation with the Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa. It’s a book that combines the thrillingly highbrow and the gossipy. In the first conversation alone we learn about the national characteristics of orchestras, the tug of war between conductor and soloist and orchestral recording techniques (as well as which classical pianist was a bit of a ladies’ man).

What’s fun about it is the way it takes the music seriously. That’s easy of course when it is culturally approved. What would be fun is to take this model and employ it on pop. Zadie Smith and Bjork, someone?

The Book with the Greatest Overlap between Hollywood Privilege and Grim Northern Indie

The Rise, the Fall and the Rise

Brix Smith Start

Faber & Faber, £14.99.

"When we got married I was just twenty years old and had known Mark less than six months. He was twenty-seven. Our wedding was in the registry office in Bury, Lancashire, outside of Manchester. Mark's parents suggested we have the reception in the Eagle and Child pubm and that we serve sausage rolls, salt and vinegar crisps and pickled onions to our guests."

It’s possible that you will not be reading Brix Smith Start’s memoir for her account of her time with violinist Nigel Kennedy. It’s the inside gen on her former husband, The Fall’s Mark E Smith that you’ll be after. Whether Fall fans will want the other stuff – working with Gok Wan and being matey with Gary Lineker – is debateable. But this is Smith Start’s story. And why should she just limit herself to a small number of often difficult years.

Actually, there have been a lot of difficult years. Smith Start’s story is emotionally painful and sometimes more than that.

Truth is, this is at times a messy, slightly overwritten account of a messy, druggy life. Mark E doesn’t emerge from it well. But he’s not the worst man to be found in these pages. It’s not a book go make you proud of the male gender, I’m afraid.

The Biggest Dose of Sex, Drugs and Bass Guitar
Substance, Peter Hook
Simon & Schuster, £20.

“I held the door for a very upper-class lady closely followed by her drunken husband. On seeing me at the door with shorts, tattoos and desert boots, he bellowed, ‘Oh my God, Natasha, they’re letting people like him in now!’”

What a laddish, leery read this is. NSFW and all that. With breakout panels for all the music/techy stuff if that’s your kind of thing .

Hooky – everyone calls him Hooky – here tells us the story of his years in New Order. And what a lecherous, drunken, druggy three decades they were.

Hooky is a born anecodotalist and, in between moaning about his fellow band members, he gives us the inside gen on the debauchery.

There are darker shadows here too. Failing friendships, the physical and mental abuse he suffered from his wife the late Caroline Aherne and his own struggles with getting himself clean. But it’s the adult fun that he clearly enjoys narrating the most. The result is an X-rated musical Jackanory.

The most surprising dose of sex, drugs and rock and roll

Porcelain

Moby

Faber, £14.99

“It was only nine p.m., but there was already a drunk girl dressed like Minnie Mouse throwing up on the corner of Mott and Houston.”

What? Moby? The Christian, Vegan, nerdy DJ?

Yes, the very one, actually. Porcelain is replete with sex (one-night stands), drugs (the rave-appropriate kind, although the author is himself keener on alcohol) and yes, rock music (in between his dance anthems he can be found in these pages making his unloved metal album Animal Rights).

Moby’s memoir is one of this year’s better-written music books, good enough anyway to just about survive the author’s attempt at litcred-by-association in the afterword in which he reminds us he’s a descendant of Herman Melville.

Recounting his early days in the music business it’s a poverty memoir of sorts in which Moby never tries to disguise the needy, self-obsessed irritant he clearly often was. So you both feel for him and find him quite annoying

In between all of that Porcelain doubles as a striking portrait of a time – the late eighties and early nineties – and a place – the wrecked and frankly drugged-up New York city. Madonna, Miles Davis and OJ Simpson all make guest appearances.

The most egotistical memoir by someone who isn’t actually a musician

Let’s Make Lots of Money

Tom Watkins with Matthew Lindsay

Virgin, £20

“John had to liquidise Luke’s food, because by now the drummer was declaring himself too tired to do anything as strenuous as actually chewing when he came off stage.”

Back in the day Tom Watkins was the foul-mouthed manager of Pet Shop Boys, Bros and East 17 and a man with an ego almost as big as his charges. His memoir is a bit of a struggle through his early years but then takes off in the 1980s when he finally finds himself at the heart of British pop. The chapters on the Goss brothers, as quoted above, are particularly amusing.

The One in which Ziggy Plays Guitar
Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, Simon Reynolds
Faber, £25

“Scratch the veneer of a punk or new wave musician in Great Britain and nine times out of ten you’ll find a glam fan underneath.”

Not quite the brickies-in-eyeliner slice of sci-fi I was hoping for perhaps, but Reynolds’s hipster academic approach looks back at glam through the stories of individual stars, from Bolan and Bowie to Alice Cooper and The Sweet. Bowie is the book’s hero, of course, but there are productive diversions through the back story of Roxy, Sparks and Queen among many others. He takes on the poisoned story of Gary Glitter and explores the politics of image and riff recycling at exhaustive length. Sore on the wrists, but good for the brain.


The Book that Mixes Up Music and Politics
Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge. Daniel Rachel
Picador, £25

“The skinhead revival was coming anyway when the Specials adopted that moddy, skinheady, Rude Boy look. The idea was to try and influence the revival, not to be racist and violent like the first time, and I think, amazingly, to a large extent it worked.”

On August 5, 1976 an inebriated Eric Clapton got up on stage at the Birmingham Odeon and called on black people to leave the country in language that was both offensive and racist. His comments led to the establishment of Rock Against Racism and a new era of political pop. Daniel Rachel’s oral history takes us through more than a decade of pop as a political weapon, from Rock Against Racism, through 2 Tone to Red Wedge, designed to help elect a Labour government in 1987. The latter was a conspicuous failure (you may have noticed), but as Rachel’s noisy, disputative and fascinating book points out, pop was one of the key vehicles to challenge racism at a time when the National Front was on the rise.

And, finally, the Definitive Music Book of the Year
I’m Not with the Band, by Sylvia Patterson
Sphere, £18.99

Bono was, in fact, encouraging a tongue-lashin’, something he saw as tremendous sport.”

A comic lament, a love letter to pop and a remembrance of times past. Music journalist Sylvia Patterson (formerly of Smash Hits, The Face and the NME and Perth Grammar School) has written a celebration of the music press and a record of its death.
Along the way she also asked Beyonce if she’s ever been sick down her cleavage, blubbed to the Manics about what happened to Richey Edwards and got threatened by various hip hop stars including Eminem. The result is both sad and hilarious. If you only read one book on this list this should be it.