About a year and a half ago, I was in a second-hand bookshop when I saw old paperbacks of For Whom The Bell Tolls and Venus In Furs and I thought, “Books with the same name as songs – Songbooks!” and my nerdy book-brain started thinking of other songs named after books – Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, Absolute Beginners – and then of books named after songs: Bright Lights, Big City, Helter Skelter, Less Than Zero etc.
The obsessive in me was hooked and I started reading those books. Along the way, I stumbled across a hidden history of rock music: How a covert CIA op might have inspired a number 1 by the Prodigy, why Axl Rose hates JD Salinger, David Bowie’s scuppered George Orwell musical, and how Britain's most notorious paedophile Jimmy Saville was also the first ever club DJ.
