Totally Wired
Postpunk Interviews and Overviews
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the bestselling postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again comes Totally Wired, a companion book of conversations with the brilliant minds who made the late seventies and early eighties such a creative era for radical music and alternative culture.
Totally Wired features thirty-two interviews with postpunk's most innovative musicians and colourful personalities - Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Green Gartside, Lydia Lunch, Edwyn Collins - as well as other movers and shakers of the period: label bosses and managers like Anthony H. Wilson and Bill Drummond, record producers such as Trevor Horn and Martin Rushent, and influential DJs and journalists like John Peel and Paul Morley.
Crackling with argument and anecdote, the conversations in Totally Wired bring a rich human dimension to the postpunk story chronicled in the critically acclaimed Rip It Up. We get to follow these exceptional (and often eccentric) characters from their earliest days through the glory and sometimes disaster of their musical adventures to what they went on to do after postpunk. We gain a vivid sense of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.
Along with the interviews, Totally Wired also includes a bonus 'overviews' section: further reflections by Simon Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, art school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery.
Buzzing with ideas and insights, Totally Wired is an absolute mind rush.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2006's Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds examined bands, like The Talking Heads, Siouxie and the Banshees, and Devo, who performed in the wake of punk rock. Calling his new volume a companion to his earlier work, Reynolds compiles interviews with David Byrne, Lydia Lunch, and 30 other "key figures... of the post-punk era." Interviews focus on each artist's journey through the era, and do indeed provide more richly detailed pictures of the people first introduced in Rip It Up, creating a "stronger sense of them as human agents with backstories and backgrounds; products of a place and a time, yet also self-created beings, fantasists and adventurers who pursued their dreams and sometimes, against the odds, realized them." Following that are a handful of rich "overviews" taken from previously published and unpublished reviews Reynolds wrote for Vibe, The New York Times and other publications, exhibiting his boundless enthusiasm and capping this musical era with a book that is as much a tribute as it is an epitaph.