Fab! Four of the year’s best books about Music
All You Need is Love by Peter Brown & Steven Gaines (Monoray £25, 352pp)
Does the world truly need another book about the Beatles? Well, Beatles fans will certainly want this one by Brown – an intimate of the Fab Four since day one and the only real person mentioned by name in a Beatles song — and Gaines, a long-time journalist and Beatles nut.
Forty years ago, they interviewed everyone who’d been anyone about the last sad years of the Beatles, and these are the transcripts of those interviews.
They’re all here: Paul (sensible), George (off with the fairies), Brian Epstein’s mum (proud), Ringo (drummer), Cynthia Lennon (less bitter than you’d imagine) and Yoko (fruitloop). Since you ask, Peter Brown was namechecked in The Ballad Of John And Yoko.
My! My! ABBA Through The Ages is available now from the Mail Bookshop
My My! Abba Through the Ages by Giles Smith (Gallery Books £20, 336pp)
Abba have the strangest career path in pop history. Huge and critically ill-considered for seven years, they split up barely in their 30s, languished in semi-obscurity, then re-emerged in the Noughties as one of the most popular bands of all time.
The Abba Gold compilation is the second bestselling album in British history, Mamma Mia has been seen by everyone at least eight times, and Voyage, their weird, performed-by-avatars stage production, is a global phenomenon.
Giles Smith has fashioned a digressive book around this story and his love of the band. His prose sparkles, and his book will be of interest to any Abba fan, recent or long-standing.
Street-Level Superstar: by Will Hodgkinson (Nine Eight Books £22, 368pp)
Lawrence is the pop superstar you have never heard of: in 40 years he has never had anything resembling a hit.
Once a handsome young man, he is now an ageing old wreck with a collapsed mouth, whose unquenchable drive for pop success has been undermined by bad luck, bad decisions and a talent for self-sabotage.
Will Hodgkinson spent a year in his company, turning this unpromising material into pure gold. Anyone who has ever failed at anything, which is most of us, will gain so much from this story of a man whose desire for stardom remains undiminished. Beautifully written by an unabashed fan in what is clearly a labour of love.
My Family and Other Rock Stars by Tiffany Murray (Fleet £22, 400pp)
My Family and Other Rockstars is available now from the Mail Bookshop
These days Tiffany Murray is a novelist, but in the mid-1970s she was a small girl who lived with her single mother Joan at Rockfield Studios in Wales, where Joan was the cordon bleu chef.
There were rock stars galore in situ: Freddie Mercury playing the piano under the stairs, and David Bowie helping Iggy Pop record his next album.
Basically, all the biggest names in British pop recorded at Rockfield and ate Joan’s obviously sumptuous food – although some of the stars barely ate at all. Bowie, for instance, mainly drank milk.
It’s all huge fun. Tiff and her friends are playing rounders out on the lawn while Bohemian Rhapsody is being recorded inside. ‘Queen aren’t allowed up here. It is ours.’