I wanted to tip folks off to this new book which I just read about, by British ex-music industry type John Nevin. It's called Kill Your Friends and it looks like an intriguing read. Nevin was an A&R rep during the halcyon days of the Britpop explosion, so he knows all about the down-and-dirty methods the business was wrapped up in. I feel like this book will probably be what I wanted the execrable Love Monkey TV show to be like (the Love Monkey book I read, and didn't really care for, but it's nothing like the TV show was). That's the hope, anyway. The paperback is out this week in the UK, with no word on an American release.
It looks like you can only get this in the UK right now. I can't seem to find it in American shops at all. I guess amazon.co.uk it is.
ReplyThere is an interesting music industry novel written by journalist Bill Flanagan, titled A&R, that I read a few years ago. The book isn't really great fiction, in the aesthetic sense, but it's decent enough.
ReplyGiven the author's profession (Flanagan is a music journalist who doubled as an executive at VH-1 for a few years), you can guess that he took the plot points from real experiences or observations in the music industry. There are label executives one-upping and backstabbing each other, the lead singer of a superstar band squashes his bass player's superior songwriting talent (I was dying to know which real group inspired that part of the novel), etc.
And the best part is - near the end of the book, one character (a grizzled music industry vet) predicts that the biz will collapse within ten years, due to technology and bad karma for all of the musicians ripped off by the suits for decades. Flanagan wrote the novel around 2000. Who knew?
That was beautiful, Baconfat.
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