Rock ‘N’ Roll Reads: The 5 Books On Our List

From Grace Jones to The Rolling Stones.

There are the rock greats. The Stones, Bowie, Grace Jones and so many more. And then there are rock’s greatest books. They’re the ones that crack open the world of music just that little bit wider, let you see a little more, fall a little harder. Here are 5 of our favourites. Just in time for the Easter long weekend...

Grace Jones’ I’ll Never Write My Memoirs

“One boyfriend told me that I loved myself too much. I thought, Well, you can love a boyfriend too much, but you can’t love yourself too much.”

She was a late night regular at Studio 54, the one to love and the woman whose albums we play on repeat. This book is a wild ride, that’s for sure. It ends, in the most Grace-like way, with her contract for her rider: backstage, among other things, she expects six bottles of Cristal, two dozen oysters unopened (“Grace does her own shucking”) and three to four bunches of flowers (“... prefer lilys and orchids.”) Decadence at its most elegant. Go on, indulge.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity

Hornby’s love-sick leading man, Rob, takes us all the through that all-too-familiar scenario where your love life doesn’t adhere to any semblance of a plan. He is miserable and it is beautiful. “Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch,” he muses, “those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” As he reflects on the greatest hits of his love life and his record shelf, this makes for the perfect just-broken-up-with book.

Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones

This has been dubbed “the greatest book ever written about the 60s” by almost every reviewer to read it since it was first published. Booth bravely followed the Stones (and just about came to an end because of it). This can’t-put-down account of Booth’s own struggles to “stay in the saddle” (“It was like being in a rodeo – you put one hand over your head and you spur this bull on and he tries his best to kill you...”), tracing the RS adventure all the way to that fateful racetrack in San Fran.

Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band

“I’ve always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect,” writes Kim Goron in Girl In A Band. Founding member and bassist of downtown noise group Sonic Youth, hers was the stuff high school mix tapes were made of. They paved the way for Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and more, and here she shares how it all came together … And how it all came undone. Sometimes, though, escape is exactly what you crave: “I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself … The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.”

Patti Smith’s Just Kids

This is the book that made so many of us want to sell absolutely everything we own and move to NYC to do whatever it is that sets our hearts on fire. A young Smith finds herself in the city that never sleeps where she meets and shares her life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. She read, she wrote, she created: “Everything distracted me, most of all myself.”

Lester Bang’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung

Cream called him the “greatest rock writer of all time”, he was the guy to call in Almost Famous and in this collection of essays and interviews, he takes us on the road with The Clash, gets personal with Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Barry White and many others. He didn’t make it to his 34th birthday but his body of work is, so says i-D Magazine, “one of the collections of rock.”