The Tastemaker: My Life With The Legends And Geniuses Of Rock Music

★★★★

Tony King

FABER. £20

High times and more with Lennon, Elton and friends.

PR guru and confidante to the stars, Tony King’s memoir fulfils the promise of its grand sub-title. King’s adventure began as a teenager at Decca in 1958, before he was fasttracked into the orbits of The Beatles, the Stones and Elton John. King is in love with music (see his peerless memories of the NY disco scene), discreet and attentive, but not afraid to call time; particularly when John Lennon misbehaves during his infamous ‘lost weekend’. “Get your cock out!” the drunk Beatle shouts at Frankie Valli one night in LA, before urinating in a hotel plant pot. Big-name anecdotes fly off the page, but there’s also a personal story here: namely King’s experiences as a gay man and the shock of discovering he has HIV later in life. After all the hi-jinks, The Tastemaker ends with Charlie Watts’s death, and unavoidably reads like a requiem for a bygone age.

Mark Blake

A Scene In Between USA

Sam Knee

★★★★

Sam Knee

CICADA. £23

The ’80s US underground reframed as sartorial trendsetters. Plaid compulsory.

How do you make style icons out of a generation who mostly tried very hard to be anything but? Credit to the British fashion connoisseur Sam Knee, who’s followed up his photography book about ’80s UK indie chic with a second volume, an attempt to make aesthetic sense of the US underground between ’82 and ’88. The book starts with R.E.M. and ends with Nirvana, but the mostly unseen snapshots in-between – bands in front rooms and scuzzy venues, in vans and donut shops – feature plenty of cultier concerns (Squirrel Bait!). There’s abundant candour and charm here, as Mod and paisley affectations give way to utilitarian grunge. “You just dress like you’re going fishing in the rain,” Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail observes of Pacific North-West practicalities. Most of the prose isn’t particularly revealing, but it’s the photos you’re here for: Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur and Screaming Trees looking like children; frequent reminders that few musicians have been the subject of more unconditionally great live photos than Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto.