Neither easy hagiography or melancholy Curtis elegy, but a sober and illuminating account of a brilliant band’s too-short...
A deep dive into one of rock music’s most path-breaking bands and cautionary tales.
The story of Joy Division has become post-punk folklore. Launched in 1976 in Manchester, a grimy and declining British industrial city, the quartet masterfully harnessed the Sex Pistols’ energy, Krautrock cool, and Doors-ish pretension. Commercial success and critical acclaim arrived fast, but the band ended with singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in May 1980, on the brink of its first U.S. tour. Veteran U.K. music journalist Savage (1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, 2015, etc.) was on the scene at the time, and this oral history reflects a level of access and attention to detail worthy of the band’s importance, including band members Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris, producer Martin Hannett, record-label impresario Tony Wilson, designer Peter Saville, and more than two dozen scenesters, photographers, and writers. (Curtis’ contributions are mostly taken from newspaper articles; commentary from his estranged wife, Deborah, comes mostly from her own memoir.) Savage’s quote-selection process emphasizes the youthfulness and naiveté of the band, who were holding down day jobs, flirting with fascist imagery, and barely competent as musicians when they began. Their much-imitated innovations—e.g., integrating electronic drums or having bass carry the melody line—emerged as the happy accidents of unschooled 20-somethings. Naiveté cut both ways, though. Everybody involved confesses being at a loss to address Curtis’ worsening epilepsy and depression and paid little mind to his lyrics, which plainly read as cries for help; shamefully, they hastened Curtis to a gig just after he was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. “People admired him for the things that were destroying him,” his widow says, and the agonizing closing pages reveal how tragically blinding that admiration was.
Neither easy hagiography or melancholy Curtis elegy, but a sober and illuminating account of a brilliant band’s too-short career.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-571-34537-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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