Entertainment
In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it has Shaped Us by Francine Stock
Many of us have been captivated from an early age by the world of movies, whether introduced to them by visits to the cinema, or watching them on TV, video and latterly DVD. Author and presenter Francine Stock’s lifelong love affair with the medium began when she was taken as a child to see ‘My Fair Lady’ on the large screen. A little later, for her the most memorable thing about the summer of 1970 was not the weather, but repeated viewings of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. Full review...
Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV by Martin Kelner
Like many English sports fans, the majority of the calories I burn are used up by shouting at the TV and occasionally going to the shops for more beer and crisps. Sports books tend to be about the sport itself or biographies of those who expended great effort to reach the top of their chosen sport. But in Martin Kelner's 'Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV', there is finally a book for the less energetic among us. Full review...
The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s by Peter Doggett
With hindsight, it’s difficult to argue with the oft-expressed opinion that David Bowie was the single most important rock musician of the 1970s. Having been a perpetual ‘one to watch’ from around 1966 onwards but with only one hit during that decade, ‘Space Oddity’, from 1972 onwards he went through several remarkable self-reinventions in musical style, with an uncanny knack of being able to pre-empt the next big trend. In examining his whole career but focusing largely on his work throughout that particular decade, Peter Doggett looks specifically at every song he recorded, including cover versions. There are also boxed-out features on each album, and articles on related topics such as ‘The Art of Minimalism’ and ‘The Heart of Plastic Soul’. He concludes that by 1979 the man’s extraordinary creativity was more or less spent and his subsequent output, successful though it may have been, was in effect treading water up to his ‘elegant, unannounced retirement’ in 2007. Full review...
Monkeys with Typewriters: How to Write Fiction and Unlock the Secret Power of Stories by Scarlett Thomas
I really wasn't expecting a book about how to write fiction to change my TV viewing habits. Alter my reading? Possibly. Improve my writing? Hopefully. But watching Grand Designs in a completely different light? Full review...
Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner
With the possible exception of Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe is probably the most written-about deceased woman in twentieth-century history. The thirty-six years of her life and the manner of her death will no doubt continue to provide an opportunity for as many writers as they have since her sudden passing. After a decade of research Lois Banner, a Professor of History and Gender Studies at university in California, has added another weighty tome to the relevant shelves. As a self-styled pioneer of second-wave feminism and the new women’s history, she has some interesting insights to offer into her subject’s life as a gender role model. Full review...
Hammered: Heavy tales from the hard rock highway by Kirk Blows
Kirk Blows is the former editor of hard rock journal Metal Hammer. Just to confuse, he is also well known as a sports writer and an authority on 'the other Hammers', namely West Ham FC. However this book is nothing to do with sport. Instead it devotes its attention to a brace of his interviews with various hard rock luminaries. These took place for the journal some years ago, and have now been revised and updated for book publication. Full review...
This is Not the End of the Book; by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere
In many ways, the cover of my edition of this book is perfectly appropriate. Huge, bold serif script, with nothing but the typeface; a declamatory instance of the art in the most common of fonts, and that perfect semi-colon at the end of the book's name - proving that that itself is not the be-all and end-all. Buy this book, as you can, in electronic form, and you might see this cover for ten seconds at most, but it is so much part and parcel of what's within. Full review...
A Sherlock Holmes Who's Who (With of Course Dr.Watson) by Molly Carr
Given the amount written about Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even the most dedicated of Sherlockians must sometimes require a refresher on the characters. As I'm certainly not the most dedicated of anything, although I love Holmes and have read the entire canon, I was eagerly anticipating the chance to remind myself of those within. Sadly, this book has done little to quench my anticipation. Full review...
Opera by Robert Cannon
Opera, Cannon tells us in the introduction to this book, 'has never ceased to grow and change – often quite radically.' His aim is to describe and show the many different facets of opera in its development over the centuries, and its relevance to the modern world. While he does not intend to write a history as such, he has organised this book chronologically as opera developed in a very conscious way across Europe. Full review...
Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Advertisement by Francesca Beauman
You might think the Lonely Hearts ad a trivial matter. You might think it should appear in lower case and not be capitalised, but you'd be in disagreement with Ms Beauman, who gives a big L and a big H to it every time she writes of it in her survey of its history. What's more, she gets to write about a lot more than just the contents of the adverts in this brilliant book. Full review...
I & I: The Natural Mystics by Colin Grant
Just mention the word reggae, and the name that nearly always springs to mind is that of Bob Marley and the Wailers. The music has always been very much a product of the Jamaican culture, nurtured in years of turbulent history. In this book Colin Grant, born in Britain of Jamaican parents, goes back deep into its roots, and in the process examines the childhood lives of the Wailers’ three main personalities, namely Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Neville Livingston, better known as Bunny Wailer, to provide an account of the group – but much more than that. Full review...
The Rum Diary - A Screenplay by Bruce Robinson
Kemp has lied his way onto a failing newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rica, as the only candidate for the job, and in a semi-comatose state induced by too many miniatures from the hotel minibar, stumbles into a conspiracy of epic proportions, via classic bar room brawls and nightclub mayhem. On the way he (almost) writes horoscopes and bowling championship stories, meets the fantastically erotic girlfriend of the evil businessman, and teams up with a proto-Nazi out of his mind on a cocktail of hootch and LSD, and a photographer side kick. There is no question that this is Hunter S Thompson territory, especially when all the above is combined with a witty, slow-talking hero who in spite of his alcoholic haze sees clearly through the exploitation of a third world country by its massive first world near neighbour. Full review...
Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game by Mick O'Shea
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a sad book. Writing this review some five months after her death, now the immediate smoke has cleared, it is apparent from this book (as well as other general sources) that she was a gifted performer, with a jazz voice which could have qualified her for a lengthy career long after scores of aspiring X-Factor contestants had given up singing and opted for less glamorous, more steady careers. After all, her idols had been not only near-contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Missy Elliott, but also those of an earlier generation such as the classic 1960s girl groups, as well as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, with whom she was thrilled to record a duet four months before she died. Full review...
A Dancer in Wartime: One Girl's Journey from the Blitz to Sadler's Wells by Gillian Lynne
At eight years old, Gill Pyrke was driving her parents crazy, as she couldn't sit still and was nicknamed wriggle-bottom. Her mum took her to see the family GP and told him in great detail how annoying she was. The doctor asked if he could talk to Gill alone and put on some music. She started to dance around and climbed on to his desk. He prescribed ballet classes. She started off in a Bromley dance class where one of her classmates was later to be the famous ballerina Beryl Grey. This story is lovely and funny, and has lots of elements of a dream story, yet is told in a very down to earth style which makes it very convincing. The same could be said of the whole of Gillian Lynne's memoir of her early years, starting out on a brilliant career in dance. Full review...
You Are Not Alone: Michael Through A Brother's Eyes by Jermaine Jackson
It is inevitable that the books we have already seen about Michael Jackson in the two years since his sudden passing will be merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet for those which comprise and are based on first-hand knowledge of his life and death, there will surely be few if any to rival this account by his brother Jermaine and ghostwriter Steve Dennis. Full review...
The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex by Mark Kermode
I've been there, and so, despite all number of free press screenings, has Mark Kermode. When a major cinema chain I probably shouldn't name, but will - Odeon - moved from their smelly inner-city fleapits to a major new development far from any convenient bus routes, they started their multiplex life with the best intentions, having an arthouse film every week, on a Wednesday, and an offer of free entry courtesy of the local newspaper. This was brilliant for me - or would have been, if they'd managed to keep up with my expectations. I lost track of the number of weeks they had the wrong film on the projector, and particularly how many times they started the right one without glimpsing that it was being shown on the wrong-sized screen, through the wrong lenses, not matching with the gate, or even upside down. The projectionist of course had eleven other screens to worry about, pressing a button for each and never needing (or wanting?) to watch a movie. Kermode is correct in that if we must still think of cinemas in the parlance of theatres, and film-showings as performances, the projectionist can ruin a show just as a bad actor can a stage play. Full review...
Marty Feldman: The Biography of a Comedy Legend by Robert Ross
Some years ago, I was given a Penguin edition of Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', with what looked like an uniquely fearsome face on the front cover. A year or two later, I saw a photograph of Marty Feldman and was convinced he must have inspired it if not actually been the model. Full review...
You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks by Nick Hasted
'People in America talk about 'The Beatles, the Stones, The Who.' For me it's 'The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks.' Those words, quoted in the book, are those of Pete Townshend of The Who himself. He is certainly not alone in his verdict that, at the height of the swinging sixties in Britain, the Muswell Hill quartet were No 3 in the premier music league. Patchy chart success since their heyday has done nothing to diminish their reputation, or that of leader Ray Davies as one of the most gifted British songwriters of the last fifty years. Full review...
Route 19 Revisited: The Clash and London Calling by Marcus Gray
When I began reading these 500 pages or so, my initial feeling was – how could anybody write a book THIS long on one album? Soon, it became clear that I had been slightly misled by the title. Although 'London Calling', long feted as the best LP (now a CD, naturally) ever made by one of punk's most seminal groups, is the focal point, this volume also charts in detail the history and development of the Clash to that point, their subsequent career (and decline), and their legacy. Full review...
Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank Sinatra by Barbara Sinatra
Barbara Blakeley, born in 1926, was married firstly to Robert Oliver, an executive, with whom she had a son, and secondly to Zeppo Marx. But it was the already thrice-married and thrice-divorced Francis Albert Sinatra, whom she had idolized as a singer for a long time, with whom she would make her most enduring marriage, and vice versa. They tied the knot in 1976, and stayed together until his death in 1998. Full review...
John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman
For part of my formative years, John Lennon was one of the four most famous people in the world. All that we have learnt about him in the thirty years or so since his death has kept his name firmly in the public eye, if not always for the best of reasons. At over 800 pages, this is one of the lengthiest biographies written about the extraordinary life and times of the former Beatle. It's also surely one of the most impartial. Full review...
Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford by Donald Spoto
Thanks to the memoir 'Mommie Dearest' by her adopted daughter Christina, the enduring image of movie star Joan Crawford is one of an alcoholic, sadistic monster. Spoto clearly believes that this portrait is a gross exaggeration, and is at pains to rectify the balance. Having previously written biographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe among others, he clearly knows the subject of cinema inside out, and has written a very thorough chronicle of Crawford's career. The impression the reader is left with, however, is that in looking at her family life and art he has perhaps striven too far to present her as a person more sinned against than sinning, a legendary talent, beauty and above all a grossly maligned adoptive mother. Full review...
Life by Keith Richards
Nearly forty years ago, Keith Richards was considered the next most likely rock'n'roll star to succumb to drugs. The man has defied all the odds in staying alive, and continuing to do what he has been doing for almost half a century. In the process, he has earned the sometimes grudging, sometimes unqualified respect of those who would once never given him the time of day. Full review...
Diaries Volume 1 by Christopher Isherwood
In January 1939 Christopher Isherwood left England for America in the company of poet WH Auden. This hefty volume covers his diaries from that date until August 1960, when he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday. A 49-page introduction setting out the background leads us into the entries, which are divided into three sections – The Emigration, to the end of 1944; The Post-war Years, to 1956; and The Late Fifties. After these we have a chronology and glossary, or to put it more accurately a section of brief biographies of the main characters mentioned, these two sections comprising over a hundred pages altogether. Full review...
The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin
At the end of the 20th century Eric Siblin was a rock and pop critic for the 'Montreal Gazette'. This, he says, was, a job which filled his head 'with vast amounts of music, much of which I didn't want to be there'. Aware that there were vast horizons crying out to be explored, he went out one night to hear a recital from the Boston cellist Lawrence Lesser, featuring the solo cello suites of Bach. The contrast between hearing one solitary performer playing a simple wooden cello for an audience a fraction of the size could have hardly been more different to the stadium style gigs he had been covering regularly until then. About three years earlier, he had reviewed a show by U2, noting that for the 52,000 fans who attended and 'wanted to see more than four Lilliputian musicians making huge noises...technology blew everything out of proportion.' The inevitable hate mail soon rolled in. Full review...
Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl: The Story of Tony and Lindsay Wilson by Lindsay Reade
Mr Manchester, as Tony Wilson came to be known, could have been the next John Humphrys. Instead he ended up becoming the next Malcolm McLaren – or, perhaps, a far less successful version of Richard Branson. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in English he became a trainee news reporter for ITN, and for much of his life he worked as an anchorman for regional evening news programmes. Yet he is less remembered for this than for his championship of alternative music and punk rock, founding of Factory Records and involvement with the Hacienda Club. Although he loved the Beatles and folk music in general, he disliked much of the contemporary music scene until he saw the Sex Pistols live in the summer of 1976. Full review...
Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater by Larry Stempel
Stempel is an associate professor of music at an American university so I would imagine that this book is primarily a labour of love. In the Preface Stempel bemoans the loss of important research material over the years, whether it be musical scores, playbills or similar. It happens. It is a fact of life. Simply thrown away or discarded as being considered not important. It's only a musical, after all. A bit light and frothy. Stempel thinks otherwise - and takes his time telling us exactly why. Full review...
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles by Peter Doggett
When four young Liverpudlians got together to make music in the early 1960s, they can have had no idea of their future impact on the world around them. Likewise they would surely not have had an inkling of the extraordinary business minefield which their existence as a group would create, and which would leave the scars long after they had gone their separate ways, even after two of them had died. As at least one of them ruefully commented, they must have provided several lawyers' children with a very expensive education. Full review...
Teenage Revolution: Growing Up in the 80s by Alan Davies
Born in 1966, Alan Davies grew up in Essex, the son of a staunchly Conservative-voting father and a mother who died of cancer when he was only six. It was a childhood dominated at first by 'Citizen Smith' and the other TV sitcoms, 'Starsky and Hutch', 'Grease', Barry Sheene, the Barron Knights, and Debbie Harry. The book begins at 1978, the year I started venturing out more, and finishes at 1988, when he graduated from Kent University to find that stand-up comedy could be an alternative to finding a job where he would have to do what he was told. Full review...
Still on the Road: Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2008 by Clinton Heylin
Heylin is also obviously a fan, a very knowledgeable and obsessive one to boot. He has never met or directly interviewed his subject (who is known to guard his privacy quite fiercely most of the time), but his research materials include official recording sessionographies and interviews conducted by others. All this is naturally invaluable information for his analysis and history of all the 600-plus songs the man is known to have written or co-written from 1974 to almost the present day. In terms of his discography, that spans the albums from ‘Blood on the Tracks’, released in 1975 and commonly regarded as probably his best post-1960s set, to ‘Together Through Life’, which appeared in 2009. Full review...
Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy by Marina Hyde
I have what is perhaps a regular-sized interest in A and B-list celebrities. I can name the off-spring of many an actress, tell you who the spokespeople for certain brands are, write a list of celebs with publicly declared devotions to certain religions, even win the odd pub quiz thanks to knowing the birth names of various performers. I know all sorts of things about this rather small subset of society, but I know the what more than the why, and that's exactly the problem, according to this book. After all, if more of us sat down to wonder about what it actually is that the likes of Geri Halliwell and Nicole Kidman bring to the UN, we might seriously question how and why they ever got involved in the first place. Full review...
Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman
Roger Barrett, who later acquired the moniker 'Syd' (let's make him Syd from now on) was born in Cambridge in 1946. The fourth of five children, he was the only one to inherit any lasting artistic talent, which came from his father Max. The latter was a senior pathologist, member of the local Philharmonic Society, gifted singer, pianist and watercolour painter. Full review...
Matt Monro: The Singer's Singer by Michele Monro
In terms of British chart statistics and record sales, Matt Monro never quite fulfilled his full potential. When measured against the achievements of contemporary ballad singers like Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, he fell some way short. Yet the former Terry Parsons was a regular fixture on the light entertainment circuit, and overseas, particularly in Latin America and the Philippines, he was undoubtedly one of Britain's most successful exports ever, and at one point he was the biggest selling artist in Spain. His idol Frank Sinatra, to whom he was often compared, often said that Matt was the only British singer he ever really listened to. Full review...
Heaven And Hell: My Life in the Eagles, 1974 - 2001 by Don Felder
In terms of record sales and income from live tours, hardly anyone matched the Eagles' rate of success during the 1970s. Yet the constant search to better themselves with each record, the in-fighting, the drugs and egos, soon got the better of them. They say it is tough at the top, and nobody is better equipped to tell the often painful story than their former guitarist Don Felder. Full review...
Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography by Will Birch
Ian Dury was always one of the most individual, even contrary characters in the musical world. In a branch of showbiz where people often relied on good looks as a short cut to stardom, he was no oil painting. During the pub rock era, he and his group, the Blockheads, ploughed a lonely furrow which owed more to jazz-funk than rock'n'roll, and his songs extolled the virtues of characters from Billericay or Plaistow rather than those from Memphis or California. Alongside the young punk rock upstarts with whom he competed for inches in the rock press, he was comparatively middle-aged. As if that was not enough, in his own words childhood illness had left him a permanent 'raspberry ripple'. Full review...
Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's by Mark Simpson
The mere mention of Alastair Sim conjures up visions of pictures made during the 1950s when a more gentle humour was the order of the day. Yet the man hated and did his best to avoid publicity, claiming that the person the public saw on screen revealed all that anybody needed to know about him. How he would have fared twenty years later in the age of a more intrusive press, one cannot but wonder. Full review...
The Richard Beckinsale Story by David Clayton
A generation probably knows Richard Beckinsale only from repeats on the UK Gold TV channels, and from occasional mentions in the context of 'how great he would have been if only…' In 1978 The Sunday Times Magazine tipped the 30-year-old sitcom favourite as a rising major star of the 80s who would blossom into one of the great all-round stage actors. One year later, he was dead. Full review...
My Story, My Life: Val Doonican - The Complete Autobiography by Val Doonican
In the 1960s, if Harold Wilson was the personification of politics and the Beatles the collective icon of youth culture, Val Doonican was similarly at the very apex of light entertainment. He may no longer have such a high profile – but he's outlasted them both. Over four decades he has refused to bow to passing fads and fashions, remained true to himself, and in the process he has never really put a foot wrong. As he says towards the end, 'When you find out what it is you do best, and what the public wants from you, then stick with it, and do it as well as you can.' With the possible exception of his contemporary and long-time professional and personal friend Rolf Harris, it's difficult to think of another person in showbiz who comes across as more genuinely likeable, and more a genuine case of 'what you see is what you get'. Full review...
The Ultimate DVD Easter Egg Guide: How to Access the Hidden Extras on Your DVD by Jo Berry
Consider the Easter Egg - at least in the way DVD collectors mean. Sometimes a pointless hidden add-on, that is there for no reason. Sometimes they can be a priceless bonus, seemingly gifted by the disc producers to those in the know, costing - at least in the case of some animated instances - many thousands of pounds. Some oik on set with a camcorder, they are not. I've been guilty several times of clicking away in directions the menus don't seem to encourage on the off-chance I find something (or, on a PC, just sweeping the PC mouse over any and every title card in case it highlights something previously invisible). Forcing several titles and chapters by going straight to them in case they're something secret is not a hobby I like to admit to. Full review...
Jazz by Gary Giddins and Scott Deveaux
At first glance this 700-page volume might look a little daunting. Do not be daunted. If you want a small pocket book which merely scratches at the surface and can probably be digested in a sitting or two, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you want an extremely readable and comprehensive book on jazz which can not only be read cover to cover, but also retained as a work of reference to use again and again, I doubt if this can be bettered. Full review...
An Education: The Screenplay by Nick Hornby
Adroit marketing? Well, yes. An Education has been published, of course, to coincide with the film's general release in the UK. Hardly surprising since our national appetite for nosiness seems insatiable and cosy background details prop up every telly series and film these days. As well as the screenplay, Nick Hornby has provided an introduction and diary of the film's successful premiere at the Sundance Festival in Utah. Beyond trivia, I think this fascinating little book presents an excellent 'how to' guide for wannabes from one of Britain's most respected screen and novel writers. Full review...