Days and Days
A Story about Sunderland’s Leatherface and the Ties That Bind
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory adventure that leads two friends into the belly of the beast with the ’90s most influential U.K. punk band that changed so many lives
It might seem odd — a punk band introducing poetry into someone’s life. But what if this lyrical influence was the reason you became a writer in the first place?
Days and Days weaves together two stories. One is a tale of friendship and self-discovery that occurs during a backpacking adventure through England, Scotland, and Ireland. The other celebrates the highly influential yet underestimated UK band Leatherface, a group that The Guardian called “the greatest British punk band of the modern era.”
Without so much as a single hostel booked, Chris MacDonald and his friend Jason cross the Atlantic. They sleep in train stations, endure a haunting on top of a volcano in Edinburgh, are driven out of Belfast by the IRA, and witness the mother of all storms. They also find themselves in the rehearsal space of their teenage punk idols, a building steeped in cultural significance for the Sunderland music scene.
Days and Days is about the silver thread that connects us even after drifting apart. It’s a story about forgiveness and reflection, how beauty can be found within callous cladding. Leatherface band members, colleagues, and friends generously share personal insights that guide the reader into the melancholy, darkness, and humor that surround Sunderland’s best-kept secret.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist MacDonald (The Things I Came Here With) combines the history of the 1990s British punk band Leatherface with visceral meditations on how the group shaped his life. After hearing the band's 1991 album, Mush, in his friend's Toronto basement as a teen, the author felt he'd found "an answer in a world I'd yet to understand." Years later, MacDonald's infatuation with the music inspired a backpacking trip across the U.K. with a friend, where they heard the band play live and befriended its members. Later, MacDonald realized Leatherface had tapped into something deeper: a love of poetry and a desire "to voice myself" in prose, so that "those expressions could be as resounding with others as Stubbs' were with me." The central narrative is interwoven—sometimes haphazardly—with the band's biography, drawn from conversations with Leatherface members. MacDonald's intimate and exuberant personal reflections are the highlight, particularly when he's capturing the sense of youthful possibility that came with discovering the band and embarking on the backpacking trip ("Passersby saw only our beat-up eyes and dishevelled appearance. But they didn't see... the two humans in the apex of life... bewildered by the power of our surroundings"). This buoyant ode to a favorite band charms.
