Excited to announce the publication this summer of Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94. On White Rabbit Books.
It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's my most personal book and the one I had the most fun writing
The Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Lost Treasure from the Lost Generation: 50 Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Here's more information / hype in the form of the official White Rabbit catalogue copy:
Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.
Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.
A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly and lovingly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.
