Books! Books! Books!

SELF OBSESSION
Free yourself from your psychological prison
by Dr Tom Davies
(Watkins Publishing)
This is not a self help book, or is it?  What is self anyway? And why are we so obsessed with ourselves and what others think of us?  I don't know, but Dr Tom Davies may.  Alan Rider hops onto the psychiatrist's couch here. 

'Self Obsession' is published by Watkins Publishing on 13th May 2025 and is available to pre-order from the Watkins store here.
(Alan Rider)

MOMENTS
Moments
by Wayne Dean-Richards
(OUTSIDELEFTbooks)
This must be the most lowkey thing we are up to. Quietly getting the OUTSIDELEFTbooks imprint underway with a new collection of short stories from Wayne Dean-Richards. Maybe Marie shouldn't have asked Darren about the best day of this life... Maybe there are risks in drinking too much at your mates dad's funeral... Maybe it's a mistake to watch old clips of Big Country on YouTube... Wayne Dean-Richards characters live around your neigbourhood, on your street and maybe most likely in your favorite television chair in your house. They know you, and less fortunately maybe, you know them.

"Wayne Dean-Richards’ profound and skillful writing never fails to impress. His uncompromising and distinctive voice is always utterly compelling." - Kerry Hadley-Pryce, author of the acclaimed 'Lie of the Land' 
(A.I. House-Painter)

EVERYTHING IS NOW: THE 1960S NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE
Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
by J. Hoberman
(Verso)
There’s possibly no one who would do this better than J. Hoberman, a 30 year career vet of film and culture for the Village Voice and the author of many books diving deeply into overlooked subcultures from midnight movies to the rise of yiddish cinema, and way more besides. 
(Ancient Champion)

COPY THIS CASSETTE
Issue 3
by Blake Werts
(Bandcamp)
Cassettes have been making a comeback for a while now.  We wrote about how cassettes subverted and upturned the dominance of major record labels and shop chains, at least for a while, in our review of Marc Masters book 'High Bias'. However, you can't keep looking in the rear view mirror and Blake Werts, the creator of this little zine, is on a mission to raise awareness of new cassette releases.  By their very nature these are independent and self produced, so having a set of reviews available to help you choose is invaluable.  This issue also includes an interview with the author of the definitive (but now sadly out of print) tome on the subject 'Cassette Culture', Jerry Krantitz, in which he reveals a soft cover version re-issue is coming soon.  There is also a useful, article on what modern cassette players are available to buy.  The short answer is; there are no really good cassette players out there these days, but TEAC or Tascam are your best bet, if a bit pricey.  By coupling this with the Australian podcast Cassette Culture (no relation to Kranitz's book), then you may stand a chance of keeping up with the latest releases in this burgeoning scene.

LONDON SUBCULTURE PUNK & PROTEST 1979–1981
by Yan Morvan
(Cafe Royal Books)
Cafe Royal books are so good, we could review one every day.  These two are actually quite scary.  They brought back memories of how violent a time that was to grow up in.  You forget the risks of just walking down the street back then.  Tattooed skinheads glaring at the camera, riots,  Police brutality, stabbings and glassings. Walking home from a gig was a potentially lethal undertaking.  I preferred to cross a dual carriageway, dodging the cars than risk using a subway after dark in Coventry.  It was visceral and these books capture all of that.

You can buy this and other Cafe Royal books from their online shop here
(Alan Rider)

NEW YORK 1995–1996
by Stephen Clarke
(Cafe Royal Books)
There is always something about a city like New York that makes it endlessly fascinating and photogenic.  Be it the yellow cabs, the brownstone apartment blocks, the steaming pavements, or the native 'Noo Yawkers', it all looks and feels like you are stepping into a film set, so familiar, yet so alien is it.  The excellent Cafe Royal books have been here before, but Stephen Clarke's snapshots  capture eloquently a year in the life of the city when it was possibly at its weirdest, coming out of being a crumbling Wild West of a place where you wouldn't dare venture into Times Square after dark, and in the process of transforming and gentrifying into the pale imitation (yet still endlessly fascinating) of the old New York it is today.  Clarke's images certainly capture its innate shabbiness, set against the glass towers and canyons of Manhatten.  The sense of hardness about the place and the knowledge that it would crush you, as it has so many, then roll right over your broken body and move on should you stumble, comes across loud and clear.  Why would anyone want to grow old in such a place?  The smart ones had their fun and got out.  Cafe Royal Books excel at capturing the social history of a place.  They have done numerous publications on UK towns too (three on Birmingham alone), each one with the air of visiting an alien planet.  The cover of 'New York 1995-1996' features a creepy Ronald McDonald clown sitting on a bench.  A clown in charge in the US eh?  Who'd have thought it.

You can buy this and other Cafe Royal books from their online shop here
(Alan Rider)

LONDON UNDERGROUND 1992–1995
by Mark McEvoy
(Cafe Royal Books)
The concept behind this is strong, as are the concepts behind all Cafe Royal photo books. The execution here, however, is less so, as is true of a few Cafe Royal photo books (and there are many!). This slim volume purports  to capture the after hours life of the tube of a Friday or Saturday evening.  Spanning a three year period from 1992 (I was living in London myself at that time so knew Tube nightlife very well) you might have reasonably expected something more unusual than a collection of morose looking night owls on their way home, the occasional snoozing body due to the effects of either drink or a very long day, plus a gang of larking about cartoon punks. I can certainly think of way more bizarre sights I witnessed every weekend. There is a shot of a 'Guardian Angel', the self styled protectors of tube travellers modelled after the NY version, who briefly appeared around the mid '90s to the disapproval of the British Transport Police and the general bemusement and indifference of travellers.  I don't recall them actually saving anyone from anything though. This is interesting, but only for a moment. Cafe Royal is generally excellent, though, so I will give them a free pass on this one.

Buy this and other Cafe Royal publications from their shop here
(Alan Rider)

RIPPED BACKSIDES
Postcards From Beneath The Pavement
by Richard Cabut
(Far West Press)
Richard Cabut’s 'Ripped Backsides: Postcards from Beneath the Pavement' isn’t a memoir, a novel, or a travelogue.  They describe it as "a séance disguised as a book." and that is an apt description.  Published by Far West Press on 24 June 2025, and named after a line in an Iggy Pop song, it weaves surrealistic prose together with photography, and voodoo poetry to form a situationist travelogue, a deftly collaged manual of hidden city dreamscapes.  Cabut is a former member of post-punk pioneers Brigandage, re-invented as a chronicler of the underground (we previously reviewed his excellent semi-autobiographical novel 'Looking For A Kiss') and certainly has a rare talent for spinning a dream like web that sits beneath the everyday reality and travel experiences of his younger self.  Every Richard Cabut book is autobiographical, formed around an mythological version of his own experiences travelling, touring with Brigandage, and staying in various locations along the way.  Presented as a series of re-imagined trips undertaken over the past 40 years (or close to), journeys of which he took no notes, but are instead re-remembered as one line fragments, scattered conversations, impressions true and false, and oblique observations and images.  It's a heady and often confusing mix, in the tradition of William Burroughs and J G Ballard, where the city has its own neon landscapes and there are no winners or losers, only experiences to be excavated and put on display.  This used to be called Psychic Geography.  Perhaps it still is.  Whatever, this small book is a pocket sized guidebook to a world that exists just beneath the everyday pavements that act as a metaphor for our mundane reality, if only we look hard enough behind the mirror.
(Alan Rider)

THE EXTRA MAN
by Jonathan Ames
(Pushkin Press)
Readers might be forgiven for thinking: Hang on a minute: The Extra Man came out in 1998! No argument from me on that score. But it’s new to me. I bought it just last week from Waterstones in Birmingham. A previous Ames I’d read - You Were Never Really Here – made into a film directed by Lynne Ramsey with Joaquin Phoenix. But The Extra Man is very different to You Were Never Really Here. And we know when the novel’s narrator, Louis Ives, tells us in the novel’s opening paragraph that he’s been ‘a respected English teacher…My downfall was a brassiere’ that we’re in the hands of a top-drawer humourist. Later, that’s re-enforced many times. For example, when Louis and his flatmate Henry Harrison ‘snicker into their wineglasses nightly’ whilst watching re-runs of Are You Being Served? and hearing Mrs Slocombe exclaim: “My pussy was out all night in the cold.” Not long after which Louis makes an appointment with a ‘Recession spankologist.’ The novel’s very funny. And when Henry tells Louis he believes that the U.S. needs ‘A single tyrant’ you could be forgiven for thinking it’s also, well, prescient!       
(Wayne Dean-Richards)

STARLORE OF THE CONSTELLATIONS
The Astronomy, Myth, and Symbolism of the Night Sky
by Geoffrey Cornelius
(Watkins Publishing)
Kleo Kay goes a wandering in the night sky in Geoffrey Cornelius’s 'Starlore of the Constellations'.  Read her review here
(Kleo Kay)

THE SILENT FILM UNIVERSE
(foreword by Jeanine Basinger)
by Ben Model
(Undercrank)
Ben Modal's knowledge of silent films is as intimate and expansive as anyone on earth. As one of the worlds leading silent film accompanists—he has been a resident film pianist at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since 1984 and for the Library of Congress since 2008—Ben moves through a non-verbal film not missing the words, but living in the silences. He is an eloquently precise translator of the ancient hieroglyphics of silent film for modern audiences.
(Lee Paul)

DOWN ON THE CORNER
Down on the Corner
by Cary Baker
(Jawbone)
I'd never really thought of street musicians busking for any other reason other than to immediately make enough money to get a meal or to get themselves into a coffee shop out of the  cold or heat. Rarely have I ever thought the some performance — almost inevitably a cover version amounted to much. Nor not much either. Street musicians should be ubiquitous in a vibrant city. I guess I saw another side of this when I was in Nashville and would-be- star street musos pulled up in their Toyota mini  trucks, (in lieu of an F-150), in the parking lot of a big box store, p.a. speaker strapped on with bungee cords. Oh man. They'd often sound so amazing it would be impossible not to stop and watch. I guess you never know where Nashville record execs are going to shop in Music City. And it works right, like winning the lottery works as a life plan too. Cary Baker's flawless book about street musicians features so many stars that you might not have considered as coming from the streets. Sure, Ted Hawkins, how about Violent Femmes? Down On The Corner is rich and well researched, beautifully designed and doesn't just settle on big names when getting to the backbeat of the busker race. 
(LamontPaul)

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH
Love Is Stronger Than Death
by Fran Lock
(Culture Matters)
Fran Lock is a giant talent and her new poetry collection, Love Is Stronger Than Death, Mary Magdalene and the Insurrection of Jesus, is no less gigantic than what has gone before. Maybe bigger. Illustrated perfectly with woodcut drawing by Ignacia Ruiz, Love Is Stronger Than Death is investigation into a love that date not speak it's name, Jesus and Mary Magdalene interwoven with Jesus' call for a simple social justice that earthbound followers often prefer to quietly misinterpret. Fran Lock concentrates her gaze on the deity, who was Mary Magdalene?  "Fran Lock’s most recent book of poetry arrived completely out of the blue into my inbox.  I took a look – and didn’t put it down until the final word. I suggest you do the same. Discover again – or for the first time – how stories and persona we think we know so well are utterly confounding, as Lock catches stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus off balance, grounding them again in breathless love stronger than death."  – Karen L. King, Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
(LamontPaul)

PUNK, ROCK, NEW WAVE NEWCASTLE & MIDDLESBROUGH 1977–1978
by Brian Gibson
(Cafe Royal Books)
Cafe Royal Books excel at offering a glimpse into the gritty reality of times now gone, that have since acquired a glossy sheen of nostalgia when viewed in the rear view mirror.' Punk, Rock, New Wave Newcastle & Middlesbrough 1977–1978' is thje perfect example of that.  Cataloguing bands and performances that have now become iconic (Penetration, Wire, Talking Heads), the reality of their situation, the cramped and tatty nature of the venues they played, and above all the audiences is a reminder that those were tough times for all.  The audiences in particular were far from the cartoon Sid Vicious clones beloved of the tabloids.  Newcastle was far from the overpriced boutiques of Kings Road.  Punk clothing was ordinary suit jackets covered in big tin badges, waistcoats, jumpers or tank tops, plain trousers (often flared),  a smattering of home made ripped shirts with scribbled slogans, and maybe a pair of sunglasses to top it off. That was the reality.  Venues were old ballrooms, sports and social clubs, halls, pub function rooms and so on, all having seen better days.  They were hot, crowded, and the sound was often terrible with PAs old and knackered, and the stage was close to the crowd.  It looks like another planet, and in many ways it really was.

Buy this and other Cafe Royal publications from their shop here
(Alan Rider)