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Recent Reviews
Oliver Craske
Rave The Guardian (UK) In Oliver Craske, Shankar has attracted a biographer who understands the intricacies of classical Indian music and the labyrinths of a culture that believes there’s no enterprise that can’t be improved by being made more complicated – religion, language, family trees, music, railway timetables. His portrait of a restless, often melancholic genius is appropriately exhaustive, involving 130 fresh interviews and 100 pages of credits. There is much to explain ... Craske handles the niceties of Shankar’s personal life with diplomacy while staying focused on his subject’s musical mission and lifelong hunger for spiritual fulfilment. He wears his expertise lightly and his passion on his sleeve; a winning combination for a definitive work.
Ray Connolly
Positive The Guardian A veteran journalist and screenwriter...Ray Connolly lays no claim to fresh revelations about the life of the group’s self-styled leader, instead offering insights into Lennon’s complex, contradictory character. He’s well qualified, having struck up a camaraderie with Lennon over the late 1960s/early 70s ... He handles their much-told tale with welcome concision ... there never was a Saint John—the man in Ray Connolly’s account is much more human, and much more lovable.
Philip Norman
Pan The Guardian \"Harrison emerges from Slowhand with his saintly halo as badly dented as the trophy Ferraris that Clapton repeatedly crashed ... [Norman\'s] analysis of Clapton’s music is cursory and cliched (there is no discography to even mention those London Howlin’ Wolf sessions), and no analysis to justify Clapton’s inclusion in that bogus \'topmost echelon – names that provoke instant, excited reaction in every country and culture\', a category for which, say, Bob Marley makes a better fit. Slowhand fails to drive one back to reassess either the highs or lows of Clapton’s career, be it his caustic brilliance with Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the tedious live recordings with Cream, the patchy venture of Blind Faith, dull solo albums like 1989’s Journeyman or the engaging acoustic sessions of 1992’s Unplugged. That’s another book entirely.\
Roger Steffens
Positive The Guardian Roger Steffens, an LA reggae historian and archivist, offers a more grounded approach in this sprawling but absorbing 'oral history', drawing on interviews with 75 assorted relatives, band members, fellow travellers and lovers; a lifetime’s research ... Many of Steffens’s interviewees mention Marley’s generosity, along with his shyness and perfectionist attitude to music making. He was not one for the high life; his preoccupations were music, football, the Bible and beautiful women ... Marley’s passing in May 1981 coincided with a shift in Jamaica’s cultural and political firmament ... So Much Things to Say (the title of a Marley song) is a fitting tribute to the tumultuous life and complex character of the country’s favourite son.
David Hepworth
Positive The Guardian To what is often a familiar story Hepworth brings rare perspicacity into the business machinations of the era, whose movers and shakers were, as he points out, often from a previous, less starry-eyed generation ... Hepworth’s rocktastic perspective means he misses a trick or two; 1971 was also the year reggae insinuated itself in the British psyche via hits such as Dave and Ansell Collins’s 'Double Barrel,' and if you are looking for 1971 music with 'afterlife', Al Green and Curtis Mayfield deserve attention. Yet Never a Dull Moment lives up to its title.
Philip Norman
Pan The Guardian As if atoning for his earlier misjudgment, Norman offers scant criticism of McCartney’s erratic solo output, and diplomatically tiptoes around his subject’s less appealing qualities ... Given the landslide of books about the Fab Four, the dearth of fresh revelations here is unsurprising, though Norman provides the first full account of McCartney’s highly uncomfortable nine days in a Japanese prison after Tokyo customs uncovered half a pound of marijuana in his baggage in 1980.
James Kaplan
Positive The Guardian \"Sinatra’s need for distraction and his terror of solitude are a central theme of Sinatra: The Chairman, James Kaplan’s meticulously researched biography...\