John Lydon - Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993)

 

I had a feeling this one might not have stood the test of time quite so well after I read Lonely Boy, and although it probably isn't quite such a riot as Steve Jones' account, it's pretty fucking good and remains a refreshing alternative to the usual bollocks about how the Pistols were actually the Raoul Vaneigem of their day - or what amounted to the usual bollocks for a long time - not to mention all that Malcolm's masterplan shite to which a few idiots still seem to subscribe.

That said, Rotten has the initially off-putting cadence of one of those as told to autobiographies, but you get used to it and the stuff that matters is what's said more than how it's been set down. Of course, Rotten has fallen out of favour of late thanks to both Country Life butter and his vocal expressions of admiration for both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Whilst I'd suggest that the Country Life thing only constitutes a betrayal if you've ever mistaken the man for Joe Strummer - and I doubt even Alan Moore managed that leap - the chuckling praise for complete shitbags seems entirely consistent with everything else he ever said in pursuit of annoying those who deserve to be annoyed as much and as often as feasibly possible.

A lot of people feel the Sex Pistols were just negative. I agree, and what the fuck is wrong with that? Sometimes the absolute most positive thing you can be in a boring society is completely negative. It helps. If you're not, you show weakness, and you must never do that.

Having never experienced any desire to belong to any club that would have me as a member, I really felt that I got what the Pistols were about from the moment I first went around my friend Sean's house and, instead of listening to Remember You're a Womble as we usually did, he somehow had a copy of that pop record with all the rude words; and so, regardless of the music, I've never understood why there are still people who don't get the Pistols, persons who presumably never developed any sort of inherent scepticism regarding those claiming to have our best interests at heart. Is it not just common sense?

With this in mind, it's worth noting that Rotten incorporates statements and even entire chapters from others who were around at the time, even where Lydon's own testimony is contradicted. If you don't understand why anyone would do that in their own autobiography, you probably need to read this and to keep reading it until you're no longer a twat.

Sorry. That's just how it is.

(R)evolution

Gary Numan (R)evolution (2020)
I've always had a lot of time for the Numan and never really bought into the idea that he ever truly fell off, so to speak. Some of his greatest albums, at least to my ears, were those which seemingly went more or less direct to the bargain bin, Berserker and Strange Charm for example. The late eighties were a bit fucking rough for me personally, and it was significant that I couldn't actually afford to buy new records for a couple of those years, which is how I came upon Strange Charm - which really got me through that rough patch. It's sad to realise that the man who recorded it now regards it as a bit of a dud, and even more depressing to read that the one occasion of This is Love getting airplay was followed by Steve Wright taking the piss out of it for being saaaaaaad.

I've always loathed Steve Wright, the unfunny fucker.

Anyway, this is a showbiz autobiography reading, as they tend to do, very much like a showbiz autobiography with the cadence of something dictated; which doesn't really matter because Numan is an interesting guy and he avoids the pitfalls which usually render this sort of thing unreadable. I'm not sure how this relates to Praying to the Aliens, the previous and now out of print account, but it doesn't feel as though anything has been left out. Numan recalls his initial rise and subsequent - and eventually temporary - fall from grace in fascinating and self-deprecating detail without mistaking record sales for artistic achievement. He's aware that the media thought he was weird, and remains thankfully unapologetic, even disinclined to portray himself in a necessarily flattering light. Above all, the aspects of this account which I hadn't anticipated are the amiable tone and the sense of humour. He doesn't really tell jokes, but he's naturally funny, and the narrative begins to feel a little like something that happened to a character played by Tony Hancock or perhaps even Robin Askwith after a few chapters - it's something in how Numan's enduring, perhaps naive optimism contrasts so dramatically with the string of custard pies which life seems to have flung in his face to a regular schedule, and not even in terms of anything so prosaic as record sales. I'm talking punchlines, like the Florida gig where an overhead waste pipe somehow broke and showered the sound desk with actual shite. It's a mercy that our man has been able to laugh at this kind of thing because the book is packed with it and to the point of reading like Davy Jones drawing the exploits of some comedically unlucky character in the pages of Viz. I expected mostly boasting, self-importance, and a million written variations on those tracks - of which there was one on each album for a while - about how the press hates Gary Numan but that's fine because Gary Numan doesn't care even though this is yet another song about how much he doesn't care; but this is a warm, genuinely thoughtful, and frequently funny book. As rock star autobiographies go, it doesn't quite top Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, but it comes surprisingly close.

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956)
Fuck me - this one took some doing, having been punctuated by the autobiography of a Sex Pistol, a Longshot collection, and a couple of issues of Marshall Law, all read for light relief because after a number of days which had been shite to varying degrees, I felt as though I deserved to enjoy my bedtime reading. I'm a little surprised at my having had this reaction. The last two Borges I tackled were great, and I was told this was the one I really needed to read, the solid gold hit single, so to speak.

Borges writes short pieces of surrealist fiction, often in the form of reviews of imaginary books, texts, or authors, which blur the lines between imagination and reality, prompting all sorts of peculiar questions about whether we're reading the story or it's reading us. I'm sure you get the idea. While Ficciones is patently at least as atmospheric as whatever I read in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand, at least as rich in imagery, and as wild in terms of existential questions, it nevertheless felt like homework. The stories seem, generally speaking, to inhabit more cerebral narratives than those in Labyrinths, which at least wrapped their ideas around a sense of space or something physical, thus giving my poor brain something more to work with; or at least that's the impression I had, and I could be wrong, and it may simply be that I simply should have saved this one for evenings in a more receptive frame of mind.

I still enjoyed this, and particularly Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Three Versions of Judas, but I have a feeling I should have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

Lonely Boy

Steve Jones Lonely Boy (2016)
I'd heard good things about this one and it has exceeded my expectations. I've read a few books about the Pistols over the years and never anticipated that the best would be written by their guitarist, a man who, by his own admission, could barely read or write until he was in his thirties. To be fair, Lonely Boy wasn't so much written as told to some bloke with a tape recorder, so it reads like a transcription of a conversation in a pub; which might be a problem but for Jones being sharp as a knife and a genuine wit. It turns out that I didn't actually know much about the guy before this beyond a penchant for pies, beer and knobbing. I didn't realise quite how driven he was in pursuit of the same, or quite how expansive his career as petty criminal had been, or that he was clearly the most important Sex Pistol, the one without whom it would have been a different group and probably a waste of time.

Lonely Boy reminds me of nothing so much as being sat in the pub with Terry, with whom I used to work, talking complete bollocks, but complete bollocks with a point, and which ultimately says something profoundly meaningful about existence albeit in an indirect way. It's a fucking joy to read and makes most other rock autobiographies look like complete wank.

Jonesy, I tip my hat to you. This is the best thing I've read in a long, long time.

Makes Lydon look a bit of a twat too!

My Amazing Adventures with the Sex Pistols

Dave Goodman My Amazing Adventures with the Sex Pistols (2006)
As may be obvious from the title, this is written in a conversational tone by someone for whom writing books doesn't come naturally, so it reads a little like a footballer's autobiography - no actual descriptions of how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend, Joe Pasquale, but we're skating pretty close; and yet in spite of this, Goodman's book threatens to be the best thing ever written about the Pistols for most of its page count - keeping in mind that I'm yet to read Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, and it's been at least a decade since I read anything by Rotten or the Vermorels. Dave Goodman was the Pistols' sound engineer, arguably their first producer, and a staple of their entourage in the early days. Amazing Adventures therefore differs from a great many of the other books - fixated as they seem to be with pound shop Situationism and layers of irony attributed to something which was actually pretty straightforward - in being an account of gigging with the Pistols before anyone had heard of them, back when it was still fun. As such, it dispels most of the mythology, not least the one about them being unable to play, and constitutes an amiable, even heart warming ramble through a much misrepresented period of rock history and even MacLaren comes out of it quite well.

If you've been in a band of even vaguely punky disposition, and if you've recorded in a London studio, you will almost certainly recognise Dave Goodman as one of an archetype. I've known at least two Daves, former hippies more through a love of booze and space fags than ideology, always a bit older than anyone in the band, working class and very, very funny. In my limited experience, the best thing about going into the studio is usually the engineer.

All the same, this isn't to say the engineer should necessarily consider writing his memoirs, hilarious though those tales may be. Goodman comes across as a likeable bloke, but one with a slightly inflated understanding of his own importance, and clearly one who has gone beyond the veil when it comes to the consumption of recreational substances - gone beyond the veil and decided to live there judging by the final ten or so pages. Somewhere near the end we begin a page with something or other about the legal arguments surrounding The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, then finish the next one reading about Tony Blair and George W. Bush conspiring to suppress the release of Dave's Wedding Day single, fearing that the knowledge it reveals will bring western capitalism crashing down around their ears - just as soon as the kids hear the song and decide they've had enough. Wedding Day is described as Anarchy in the UK re-recorded with new lyrics written by Goodman. I had a look on Discogs, but they don't seem to have any copies, or even to acknowledge its ever having existed. It's a shame the book ends as it does, but is probably consistent with this being the same guy who made those pointless Ex Pistols records.

So I went from recognising the type from studio engineers I've known, to feeling as though I've actually been in a band with this guy, which is a bit tiresome given a couple of the nutcases for whom I've squozen an accordion over the years.