2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 9P
eople tend to have a fairly spe-
cific idea of what theycan
expect from a musician’s auto-
biography. Excess. Smashed-
up hotel rooms, mountains of
drugs, the requisite number of naked
men and women. And, yes, many do
offer those familiar tales, but as the rock
memoir has becomebig business in
recent years — particularly as the gods of
the 1960s and 1970s golden age of rock
begin to die off, feeding the appetite for
their stories before it’s too late — many
of the best and biggest books have taken
different paths.
Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
offered no war stories, instead stripping
away the artifice around that monolith
of American rock. Rod Stewart’s fantas-
tic book had the drugs and the women
(how could it not?), but was actually
most involving when he was mocking
himself, and most moving when he was
talking about his love of model railways.
Jeff Tweedy of Wilco treated his life story
as an opportunity to engage in extended
self-examination. Still, the formula for
the perfect rock memoir remains sim-
ple: combine a big star, enough honesty
and a decent writer (usually a ghost,
though Springsteen wrote his own) and
you’ve got a banker.
Hence the fees being paid for the big-
gest books.Springsteen eportedly gotr
$10m for his book; music industry
rumour has it that Elton John’s memoir
Me old for even more, with some pro-s
portion of that spent on bringing in
Alexis Petridis — the most stylish of cur-
rent British music writers — to be his
amanuensis (I was Petridis’s editor for
11 years, though that only made me
enjoy his writing more). And hence this
autumn bringing a rash of big music
memoirs alongside it: books by Debbie
Harry, Madness, Brett Anderson from
Suede, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers,
Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!, Patti Smith
and, incredibly, Prince — incredible
because not only is the author dead, but
he had only managed to hand-write part
of one chapter before dying.
The introduction by Prince’s putative
ghostwriter — Dan Piepenbring of The
Paris Review — gives a succinct explan-
ation of how the book ended up being
published: “One of [the] first priorities,
given the sizeable tax bill the estate was
facing, was to monetise Prince’s assets
however they could... Representatives
from Bremer [the administrator] got in
touch with Random House: Was there
any way the book was still possible?” Of
course there was.
The new seriousness of the rock
memoir ontrasts with rock’s actualc
golden age. Back then, the major musi-
cians were too consumed with their
careers towrite books, and rock books
were either shoddy exploitation texts
(“The Official Story!”) aimed at teenage
fans or ones written from the outside by
the first generation of music writers.
In the 1990s, with the growth of the
heritage rock industry driven by the CD
boom and magazines such as Mojo, rock
memoirs began to flourish (I commend
to you David Lee Roth’s 1998 book razyC
From the Heat, which is entirely untrust-
worthy and completely fabulous). This
century, as the biggest stars realise that
their best musical days are behind them
and they have legacies to protect,they
have boomed, along with books by cult
heroes — such as Viv Albertine of The
Slits — whose lustre has grown with the
passing of the years and the spreading of
their musical influence.
Rock stars are rarely mostinterested
in talking about their own success. Any-
one who has interviewed them knows
they come alive talking about their own
teenage musical infatuations. That
means that while their memoirs theo-
retically have more in common with
sports stars’ books than anything else —
the same firework trajectory through
extreme fame at a young age — they end
up being unlike those books. While the
most fascinating events in a sports star’slife tend to be the biggest ones — the
Olympic gold medal, the Tour de France
victory — precisely because they are the
most dramatic, the period of greatest
success is rarely the most dramatic part
of a musician’s life. It’s the time when
they are most isolated from the world,
from their friends, when what ties a
band together frays under the strain of
drugs, drink and jealousy. Every day
becomes the same — hotel, travel,
venue, sound check, show, hotel —
which means there’s little to say about
any of those days.
The real excitement is always to be
found before the burdensomesuper-
stardom, when everything is new. Elton
John is particularly good on his vertigi-
nous rise: on page 81 alone he manages
to shame Liberace by not being present
when the pianist calls him on stage,
because he’s coming out to his parents,
then infuriates his neighbours when
Neil Young comes over at 2am to deliver
a live voice-and-piano rendition ofthe
as-yet-unreleasedHarvestalbum.
Nevertheless, the superstar years are
presumed to be the selling point of rock
memoirs. And so book after book fol-
lows the same trajectory: a brilliant
start derailed by the grim necessity of
detailing the big tours and how they
made the hit albums, usually in a man-
ner distinctly lacking the passion of
their descriptions of their rise.
InFace It, Debbie Harry is frank about
the misery of what Neil Tennant of Pet
Shop Boys described as a band’s “imp-erial phase”: “I keep thinking there
must have been some good times. Feels
like I’m always remembering the hard
times. I can’t for the life of me think of
any funny experiences.” Anderson fol-
lows Suede’s biggest hits by upgrading
his recreational habits to full-blown
heroin addiction: “My understanding of
the world was ever narrowing to the epi-
centre of the glass-topped table around
which my friends and I permanently
perched as we conducted our obsessive
new duties like devout acolytes attend-
ing to a shrine.”
John is more fun about his imperial
phase, no matter that it involved a
descent into cocaine usage so deep, as he
puts it, that: “My appetite for the stuff
was unbelievable — enough to attract
comment in the circles I was moving in.
Given that I was a rock star spending a
lot of time in 70s LA, this was a not
inconsiderable feat.” John’s willingness
to overshare (and to let his ghostwriter
play events for comedy, not tragedy)
makes the most peculiar events into
delights; he concludes an anecdote
about trying to pick up men at Studio 54
when zonked on cocaine with the obser-
vation: “It’s hard to conjure up a seduc-
tive mood when your eyeballs are point-
ing in different directions and it takes
you three attempts to successfully navi-
gate your way through the exit.”
Prince’s book doesn’t reach his impe-
rialphase, sadly. In fact he doesn’t get
any further than his teens. Most ofThe
Beautiful Ones s filled out with photosiand notes from his archive, and the little
text there is suggests that Piepenbring,
for all his professed excitement in the
introduction, would have had a task
somewhere north of thankless turning
Prince’s thoughts intoa book that the
wider world, rather than just Prince
obsessives, would have wanted to read.
And that’s a shame. Not least because
Prince is one of the most extraordinary
musicians pop culture ever produced,
but also because it means we’ll never get
to read his love story, and the love story
is the heart of every rock memoir. It’s
not the romantic love for a life partner
(often, they are barely mentioned), but
the love between people who discover
that when they come together they cre-
ate something extraordinary.
InMe, it’s the love betweenJohn and
the writer of his lyrics, Bernie Taupin; in
Afternoons With the Blinds Down, it’s that
betweenAnderson and Suede’s original
guitarist, Bernard Butler; inFace It, it’s
shared byHarry and Chris Stein (who
were also lovers); inBefore We Was We,
it’s a multi-faceted affair between theseven members who made up Madness.
The Madness book — brilliantly
assembled by journalist Tom Doyle as
an oral history featuring the voices of all
the members — is so focused on the rela-
tionships within the band that it more or
less dispenses with the story of their
career. The book ends in 1979, the year
Madness released their first single. In
doing so, it tells you more about how a
band becomes a band than any number
of anecdotes about life in the studio.
Before We Was We s the only musici
book I have read that comes with a map:
of Kentish Town in north London, and
the surrounding area. It shows how
closely tied to the district Madness are.
As much as anything, the book is a social
history of growing up on the edges of
criminality in what was then a poor part
of the capital. There are stories of steal-
ing scooters, of looting gas meters and
the money tins in launderettes, of fights
and police cells and court appearances.
Nothing is paid for: the principals “bunk
in” to gigs and to films. Records are
nicked from shops foolish enough to
keep them in their sleeves. When they
wanted to see somewhere other than
Kentish Town, they would climb on to a
railway bridge and jump on a freight
train. And sometimes they would board
freight trains for other reasons.
“Once, we opened this train and we
got an outboard motor,” recalls guitarist
Chris Foreman. “What a load of teenage
kids were going to do with an outboard
motor... ‘Yeah, but it’s probably worth
a few hundred quid.’ But, I mean, how
are you going to sell an outboard motor
in this big box?”
One of pop music’s great truisms is
that the best bands are like gangs. Mad-
ness were a gang before they were a
band. Rather than just being young men
brought together by a small ad in a
music magazine, their very existence
represented their peers, which was why
they became something that few bands
manage: the cornerstones of a subcul-
ture, the skinhead revival that sprang
up in the late 1970s. They spearheaded a
renewal of interest in Jamaican ska
music that wouldgo global.
Something similar happened with
Suede, albeit on a lesser scale, when
they became one of the first bands in the
movement that was named Britpop.
Anderson writes well of how his own
ambition, the desire of the weekly music
pressand the desire of the indie music
audience for something colourful, glam-
orous and “their own” combined to
make them seem otherworldly. “We
started to play small iconic London ven-
ues, always ensuring that they were
dangerously oversold, heaving with
steaming, sweaty bodies and almost
impossible to get into,” he writes. That
“manufactured hysteria” was in tune
with the core ethos of Suede, a desire to
“transcend the everyday, to reach for
the heightened state”.
The rock autobiography might be at
its zenith right now, with enough of
music’s golden generation still alive to
churn them out (the biggest prize of all,
the Moby Dick of rock memoirs, is Mick
Jagger, but no publisher has yet been
able to harpoon him). But how long will
this golden age last? With the cultural
centrality of music diminishing with
each passing year, whose autobiograph-
ies now would capture the wider imagi-
nation in the way Elton John’s has?
When artistscontrol their own narra-
tives via social media, is there a needfor
a book to set the record straight? The
biggest of today’s stars — Beyoncé,
Rihannaet al —treat the notion of com-
plete self-revelation to an interviewer, a
staple of rock stars of the past, as utterly
alien, so why would they sign up for 300
pages of it?
Whatever happens, here’s one guar-
antee: when Ed Sheeran publishes his
autobiography, he’ll talk a lot more
fondly about playing the pubs than he
will about playing Wembley Stadium.
They all do.The rock autobiography
might be at its zenith,
with enough of music’s
golden generation still
alive to churn them out —
but how long will it last?
Me
by Elton John
Macmillan £25, 384 pagesBefore We Was We:
Madness
by Madness
Virgin £20, 320 pagesFace It: A Memoir
by Debbie Harry
HarperCollins £20, 368 pagesAfternoons with
the Blinds Drawn
by Brett Anderson
Little, Brown £18.99, 288 pagesThe Beautiful Ones
by Prince
Century £25, 288 pagesB
arring a few notable except-
ions, the consensus among
the commentariat over the
past few years — at least in
the US and Britain — por-
trays Vladimir Putin as a mastermind
who runs rings around “western” lead-
ers. He might be bad, the argument
goes, but Russian trains run on time
and with the travails facing liberal
democracies, the canny operator in the
Kremlin triumphs over the west as he is
doing in the Middle East, resetting the
geopolitical map. Putin, by comparison
with so many western leaders, has been
a huge success. Really?
It takes the biographer of Lenin, Sta-
lin, Trotsky and Tsar Nicholas II tooffer a broader perspective and place
Putin in the great sweep of Russian his-
tory, where judgment will surely be less
kind to the man who has ruled Russia
since the first day of the 21st century
(and counting). In his nuanced account
of Putin in power, Robert Service illus-
trates how the strongman in the Krem-
lin has changed Russia — yet every-
thing has stayed the same. The country
remains the “prison house” that Alex-
ander Herzen and Leninlabelled it in
the 19th century.
As Service shows inKremlin Winter,Putin’s Russia is “modern” in name only.
Yes, there is a surface gloss of prosperity,
with shiny new buildings in some cities.
But venture outside Moscow or St
Petersburg and there is scarcity remi-
niscent of the Soviet era.Russians can
travel freely as never before and own
property — as long as high politics or the
Kremlin’s big business chums have no
stake in the enterprise. They an readc
books anduse the internet and social
media relatively freely, but TV — still
the most potent medium in Russia —
and the press are essentially state-con-
trolled. For all thegreat power postur-
ing, Russia’seconomy is not that much
bigger thanthat of the Netherlands. It
manufactures little and remains almost
wholly dependent on oil and gas.
The cult of Putin has it thathe inspires
hope and optimism. Yet Russia’s popu-
lation is in potentially disastrous
decline; life expectancy for men is a dec-
ade lower than in Britain. Alcoholism is
as rife as when Dostoyevsky or Mikhail
Gorbachevlamented it. This doesn’tKremlin Winter:
Russia and the
Second Coming
of Vladimir
Putin
by Robert Service
Picador £25,
432 pagesPutin is adept at using intellectuals at
home to furnish him with a “Russia
First” ideology that strikes powerful
chords among his people. And like
Lenin and Stalin, who deployed “useful
idiots” and Communist fellow travellers
as their apologists in the west, Putin has
plenty of willing accomplices now — on
the far-right and left and, more import-
antly, among the bankers and money
launderers inLondon and Wall Street.
As Service explains, the most perni-
cious argument among Putin admirers
has been that a country as big and
diverse as Russia needs a traditional
authoritarian boss — avozhd. This plays
entirely into Putin’s own narrative and
is commonly accepted as a given. Yet
there is no “Putinism”, which is why talk
of a second cold war is unconvincing.
Russian nationalism does not offer an
alternative vision of history and of the
world as Communism once did.
How strong and popular is the presi-
dent? Russians give him much credit —
as Service does — for stemming the post-Communist chaos of the 1990s. But the
increasing size and scope of demonstr-
ations in Moscow, the arrests and mur-
ders of Kremlin opponents, the precau-
tionary ballot rigging at elections, the
slide back into autocracy, all suggest a
weakening leader. Putin apologists talk
up opinion polls with great numbers for
the president. But if opinion polls are to
be believed, even in the west, there
would be no Brexit and Hillary Clinton
would be US president. Who in Nizhny
Novgorod would tell a pollster they dis-
approve of Vladimir Putin?
Service has written widely about rev-
olutions. He knows that when regime
change occurs in Russia, it happens with
extraordinary speed and at an unpre-
dictable time. It may seem highly
unlikely today, but in the revolutionary
age we are in now, stability is a fragile
thing. It would be foolish to discount a
world without Putin — and soon.VictorSebestyenistheauthorof‘Revolution
1989:TheFalloftheSovietEmpire’The truth about an all-powerful Putin
Victor Sebestyen elcomes aw
nuanced account of Kremlinpower that exposes Russia’s
underlying weaknessesLove was the drug
Rock memoirs are sold on the promise of lurid tales of excess — but it’s the years before they were
famous that offer the most compelling insights into the superstar psyche. ByMichael Hann
Above: Elton John on stage
in 1974
Michael Putland/Getty Imagesseem like optimism. At vast expense,
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and
still in effect occupies parts of eastern
Ukraine. It may look as if it has secured
the upper hand in thewar in Syria, but
it could be mired in a Middle East
conflict from which it will find it every
bit as hard to escape as the western pow-
ers have done. None of which is a glitter-
ing record.
Putin’s “success” is how he retains and
exercises power — Russia’s eternal ques-
tion, as Lenin framed it: “Who, whom?”
(Who has power, and for whom?) This is
where Service, Britain’s foremost histo-
rian of modern Russia, is at his most
acute. He describes with telling detail
how Putin turned a one-party state into
a one-clique state. The president’s
former KGB cronies, thesiloviki, run the
bureaucracy and the oligarchs who stole
the Russian state in the most epic exam-
ple of grand larceny in history support
him. Service fills in plenty of new mate-
rial about how the kleptocrats around
Putin have made his family vastly rich.NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 31/10/2019- 17:21 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD9, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 9, 1