Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story

★★★★

Barry Mazor

DA CAPO. £28

An insightful biography of the rock’n’roll trailblazers.

Tony Gale/Alamy

Blood Harmony is a natural, perhaps inevitable, title for the story of The Everly Brothers, the pioneering rock’n’roll duo whose blend of country and R&B established the parameters of what became known as Americana. Seemingly singing as one, Don and Phil Everly appeared to embody the notion that something intrinsically special, even mystical, happens when siblings harmonise. Singing came easily for the Everlys but, as Barry Mazor details in this perceptive biography, everything else did not.

Perennial outsiders, either a step ahead or a step behind the times, the Everlys amassed a formidable, influential body of work, frequently created while the pair were at loggerheads. Without succumbing to gossip, Mazor details those differing personalities while retaining a clear focus on the duo’s music, tracing its creation and lasting impact.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

The Absence: Memoirs Of A Banshee Drummer

★★★★

Budgie

WHITE RABBIT. £25

Raw account of post-punk life from the one-time Peter Clarke.

Bleeding on the floor of a Honolulu bar, Siouxsie And The Banshees’ drummer Budgie was about to be dispatched by two angry sailors armed with a shrub when Siouxsie Sioux, a stiletto in each fist, straddled his body shouting “Who’s first?” While Budgie’s revelatory autobiography overflows with such fabulous anecdotes from his time in punk-era Liverpool, his stint with The Slits, or his close-up observations of occasional Banshee Robert Smith, The Absence is inescapably melancholy. The title refers to Budgie losing his mother when he was a child in St Helens, a trauma that haunts his chaotic post-punk progress. Tender descriptions of home, loss, and youthful dysfunction recall Brett Anderson’s Coal Black Mornings: gently lyrical, acutely self-aware. His volatile relationship with Sioux, meanwhile, is caught in startling detail, their twin demons (she lost her father young) bonding them in ways they barely grasp through fame and alcohol’s warping effects. As a musical memoir, it’s brilliantly illuminating, but The Absence is also a powerful document of the damage life can do.