Still In A Dream: UK events, media appearances + articles, Fifty Lost Treasures limited-edition fanzine, translations

LATEST: Me talking Dream @ Word In Your Ear podcast w/ Mark Ellen + Dave Hepworth

LATEST: Me talking Dream at Paul McDermott's To Here Knows When podcast.

Still In A Dream YouTube playlist

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Just over two weeks now until my new book is out!

Below you will find info about the UK tour in mid-June; advance praise; news about the US edition and the translated versions in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Turkish;  links to upcoming podcast appearances, interviews, and pieces written by me related to the book; info about the limited-edition zine Fifty Lost Treasures available only through pre-orders at select retailers.

                                                        

UK edition published June 18 by White Rabbit Books - pre-order. US edition Jan 2027.

STILL IN A DREAM UK TOUR JUNE 15-20

Dates, times, host locations, links for tickets, plus info about who will be joining me onstage to talk about the book and the era

Monday 15 - London - Rough Trade East 

Location: Old Truman Brewery 91, Brick Ln, London E1 6QL 

Time: 8pm

Conversation with Miki Berenyi (Lush / author Fingers Crossed)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing. 

Get tickets here

Tuesday 16 - Bath - Roseberry Road Studios

Location: 25 - 28 Roseberry Road, Bath, Somerset, BA2 3DX 

Time: evening, details TBC

Conversation with Jonathan Wright (journalist and Groovy Times co-founder)

Followed by audience Q+A, book signing and a DJ set from Dave Howell

Get tickets here

Wednesday 17 - Bristol -  Strange Brew

Location: Strange Brew, 10-12 Fairfax St, Bristol BS1 3DB 

Time: evening, details TBC

Conversation with Darran McLaughlin (Strange Brew)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing (books courtesy Bookhaus).

Get tickets here

  

Thursday 18 - London  - IMCP The Long Play Sessions,

Location: The Venue, ICMP (Queens Park Campus), NW6 6PA 

Time: 7pm 

Conversation with Rudy Tambala (A.R. Kane)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing

Get tickets here

Friday 19 - Leeds - Waterstones 

Location: 93-97 Albion St, Leeds LS1 5AP 

Time: evening, details TBC

In conversation with David Hesmondhalgh (Leeds University / author Why Music Matters)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing.  

Get tickets here

Saturday 20 - Brighton - Resident

Location: 27 - 28 Kensington Gardens, North Laine, Brighton, BN1 4AL 

Time: evening, TBC

Conversation with Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins / Bella Union) 

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing  

Get tickets here

ENDORSEMENTS

Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'

- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynolds's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity

- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror

'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'

- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer

‘The alternative guitar rock of the late 80s was imaginative, expansive, experimental, and ultimately - and perhaps unexpectedly - proved to have a lasting impact on the way pop sounds in the 21st Century. Simon Reynolds was there, filing dispatches from rock's cutting edge: part-memoir of a lost world of music journalism, part critical analysis, Still In A Dream brings an important and exhilarating era vividly to life’

- Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS, AND OTHER MEDIA APPEARANCEs, PLUS  ARTICLES BY ME RELATED TO THE BOOK

My essay for Vice's "Self-Destruction" issue - connecting Velvet Underground's "Heroin" to the oblivion-thru-obliteration aesthetic of narcotic neo-psych bands like Spacemen 3 and other late '80s bliss-rockers. (published imminently)

To Here Knows When podcast - excellent chat with Paul McDermott 

Word In Your Ear podcast - a really fun conversation with Mark Ellen and David Hepworth - the episode with me now available on Apple   and YouTube

Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

FIFTY LOST TREASURES bonus zine

For the U.K. only, the Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Fifty Lost Treasures dedicated to "lost treasure from the lost generation", artists not covered or only glancingly mentioned in the book.  

You can get it here at Gnostic Sonics or here at Resident or here at Stranger Than Paradise or here at Norman Records

TRANSLATIONS

German version from Ventil Verlag. November 2026.

Spanish language version is due from Caja Negra Editora in Argentina. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Turkish version from Ayrinti. Date TBA

Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94 - out June 18!

 

"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'"

- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynold's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity"

- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror

'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'

- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer

UK pre-order here. 

US edition out January 2027.

Spanish language version due from Caja Negra Editora. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

German version from  Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Turkish edition from Ayrıntı. Date TBA

The Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Lost Treasure from the Lost Generation: Fifty Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Rough Trade Special Offer - pre-order here

Here's a Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

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.

And a personal note from the author: 

Still In A Dream is 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 Lost Epigraphs

 “There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defence. ‘Look how absurd I was when I was young’ forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history…. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant times, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony” 

- Graham Greene, A Sort of Life.

“We are the Melody Maker 

And we are the dreamers of dreams”

- Arthur O’ Shaughnessy

Lodestar Quotes

 “Oh mirror! Cold water frozen by boredom within your frame, 

How many times, for hours on end, 
Saddened by dreams and searching for my memories, 
Which are like dead leaves in the deep hole beneath your glassy surface,
Have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost! 
But, oh horror! 
On certain evenings, in your cruel pool, 
I have recognised the barrenness of my disordered dream!”

–Stéphane Mallarmé, “Herodias”,

“Why then should one insist on forcing dreams, texts, words, and actions to signify? Keep the dream-bursts apart; let them resound together without filling the intervals that allow them to coexist in all their richness within dissonance … Forget meaning and with it the subject. Repression cannot resist the folly of winds. Beauty will be amnesiac or it will not be at all" ~ Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs" 

“All my efforts are for the moment directed along one line: conquer boredom. I think of nothing else night and day”. - Andre Breton, to Jean Cocteau

“The lucidity of the depths of torpor” – Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to
Death,” from The Work of Fire

 “Boredom had reached an intolerable depth. The boredom was as deep as the love and more enduring – indeed it descends on me too often today” - Graham Greene

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…..  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
- Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance

“Well the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end” 
- Jim Morrison

"One must always be drunk. Everything lies in that: it is the only question worth considering. In order not feel the horrible burden of Time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art? – As you will; but intoxicate yourself. 
…  Ask what time it is? And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will answer you: ‘It is time to intoxicate yourself’. In order to escape from the slavish martyrdom of Time, intoxicate yourself, unceasingly intoxicate yourself; - with wine, with poetry, with art, with virtue, or with what you will” - 
-  Charles Baudelaire 

“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason.... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music to the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mastering efficacy goes forth from it, of which, however, no man is able to give an account. Religious worship therefore cannot do without music. It is one the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel” - Goethe

“Adulthood is the abdication of ecstasy” - Simon Critchley, Mysticism. 

“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life and the world eternally justified.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,

“The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations” - Susan Sontag

“Criticism is always historical or prospective, the presentation of bliss, is forbidden it; its preferred material is thus culture, which is everything in us except our present” – Roland Barthes

'Pop songs celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate ... they measure the depth and originality of their emotions by reference to their inability to find words for them'. 
- Simon Frith, Sound Effects

"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound.  No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."
- Robert Ray 

“It almost ruined it, in a way. It became journalism and not poetry” – John Lennon falling under the influence of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and recording Sometime in New York City.

“To the listener who desires to hear the words above the music corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings” versus folk, which contains “the most intense effort of language to imitate the condition of music…. The continuously generating melody scatters image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady flow” 
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,

“Music has its existence on the borderline between meaning and nonsense. That is why most attempts to attribute a specific meaning to a piece of music seems to be beside the point…. At the end of the eighteenth century, music was the envy of all the other arts because of its refusal to be bound by any rigid system of meaning…. Music will not acknowledge a context greater than itself – social, cultural, or biographical – to which it is conveniently subservient. ” – Charles Rosen

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought”
- Thomas Beecham

“To grant music a moral function, however, it would seem necessary to amputate and discard all its pathos, everything heady and orgiastic in it, and, finally, to deprive oneself of poetic intoxication in any form. For music does not always convey the serenity of wise men; it fevers those who listen to it, drives them mad. Music is derationalizing and unhealthy…. Music invokes an unreasonable existence, a bit orgiastic, consciousness made frenetic, ravaged by tragedy or deliria, prey to backward-looking nostalgia or to the wrathful storms of passion. Intoxication is not wisdom.”
- Vladimir Jankelevitch

“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream…  When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow?... All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside” - Ingmar Bergman on Andrei Tarkovsky: 

"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not" – Oscar Wilde

“Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves” - Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, 1864

“Directly, in itself, music signifies nothing, unless by convention or association. Music means nothing and yet means everything…. In the very measure that one tends to confer upon music the dimension of depth, music is, perhaps, the most superficial form of appearance”
- Vladimir Jankelevitch


“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation...  should be nothing without the form...  that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees....  It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other”- Walter Pater, in ‘The School of Giorgione’; from The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry, 1877

“Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, 1889

TK

tk

tk