If it feels as though you can’t move for new music, then books about pop aren’t far behind. This Christmas alone has brought weighty tomes by Bono and Bob Dylan, Nick Cave’s conversations with the writer Sean O’Hagan, Bez’s autobiography, and former GQ editor Dylan Jones’s book about 1995. In recent years in the UK, two new imprints have launched – Nine Eight and White Rabbit – both running music-only lists within larger publishing groups. Omnibus is still soldiering on after 50 years, and the big non-specialist publishers have music lists, too. Music writing has its own literary festivals – Louder Than Words in Manchester, Aye Write! in Glasgow – and its own prizes.
There are probably a few reasons for this glut, suggests Pete Selby, founder of Nine Eight. “A lot of it is generational,” he says – hence new books by 90s acts such as Jarvis Cocker, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite and the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess “whose thoughts are starting to turn to getting it all down on paper”. Plus, “the calibre of music publishing has never been stronger than over the past 10 years – the bar is really high, which acts as its own self-fulfilling virtuous circle”.
