BOOKS
REVIEWED THIS MONTH
MY ROCK’N’ROLL FRIEND
TRACEY THORN
CANONGATE, £17
8/10
LAST CHANCE TEXACO
RICKIE LEE JONES
BLACK CAT, £20
8/10
HOLLYWOOD EDEN
JOEL SELVIN
ANANSI, £20
7/10
GO-BETWEENS drummer Lindy Morrison clattered into Tracey Thorn’s dressing room in March 1983, when the future Everything But The Girl star was preparing to support Orange Juice at London’s Lyceum with her first band, the Marine Girls. Eleven years Thorn’s senior, and a good deal more forthright, Morrison introduced herself with a bellow: “HAS ANYONE HERE GOT A LIPSTICK I CAN BORROW?”
It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship, which Thorn has documented in all its messy details in My Rock’n’Roll Friend. A hippie radical turned punk hellion, Morrison spotted the potential in The Go-Betweens’ bookish twin songwriters, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, when she saw an early incarnation of the band. The way Thorn tells it, Morrison proceeded to literally drum them into shape, helping to ground their wistful songs and, as Forster’s partner, inspire much of the material that graced their six 1980s albums. “Robert and Grant were cool, and she brought heat,” Thorn writes. “They were cerebral and she brought physicality.”