Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars          Jamie Collinson’s study of those forced out of the bands they sometimes founded makes for a refreshingly insightful, entertaining and at times poignant read. Boldly subtitled An Alternative History Of Popular Music, Collinson’s book mixes research, interviews, personal interludes, and a series of wonderful footnotes that join the dots between more than thirty subjects. At one point he writes a gonzo style first person short story charting Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten’s final days before and after being sacked by Neil Young.     Ousted Beatles drummer Pete Best, doomed Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and dumped-on Velvet Underground auteur John Cale are all in the mix, as are ‘All the Musicians Kicked Out of Fleetwood Mac’ but Collinson focuses on what are perhaps lesser-known stories that are by turns tragic, absurd, and occasionally redemptive.   While the book moves beyond boys with guitars and bad habits by ...

Talk about a revolution. Francis Spufford’s reimagining of the mid twentieth century utopian Soviet dream is a refreshingly audacious melding of historical fact reimagined as presumed fiction that puts Communist leader Nikita Kruschev and American president Eisenhower in the same milieu as a roll-call of model workers and revolting peasants as a sleek sci-fi future based on misguided optimism gradually caves in on itself. If the planned economy sounds like a dry subject for such a sprawl, think again. Spufford’s approach may be exhaustively detailed, but it’s also a self-consciously playful piece of meta-fiction that comes complete with more than fifty pages of notes and a full bibliography. Yet beyond such archness is an epic re-reading of a much misunderstood and often romanticised era that casts a serious eye on its subject beyond its comic style, creating a glorious myth out of a past gone mad that never quite found its future. The List, August 2010 ends