John Scanlan is the Series Editor of Reverb with Reaktion Books.
‘we fought for toilet rolls,’ says Iggy — ‘did anyone invent rock’n’roll’ says Louis Menand — ‘The Last Note’, 1976 by Michael Zagaris — Glastonbury according to AA Gill — Bob Dylan’s 10 Best Film Performances — Casting Martin Scorsese’s Ramones film
D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1966) – which I write about in my forthcoming book, Rock-N-Roll Plays Itself (to be published in early 2022) – might have once been seen simply asa film about a popular singer on tour told through the medium of a new kind of fly-on-the-wall kind of documentary film. But with […]
A short extract from the opening chapter of John Scanlan, Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine (2016). This is from Chapter 1, ‘I’ll Be So Bad’, which is about Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s. It was October 1964. Malcolm McLaren, then a few months shy of his nineteenth birthday and going by the name of […]
Downtown ’81 — D.A. Pennebaker on Bob Dylan, John Lennon, cinema vérité and Mary Poppins — ‘Sublime and Sombre’, Stockholm’s ABBA museum — Debbie Harry, quite possibly the most iconic woman in music — Seven great Nic Roeg moments — The Persistence of Prog Rock
In the early 1990s David Bowie began to detach himself from the weight of his own musical legacy, and in doing so – which involved disappearing from the hit parade – he nonetheless ended up as one of the richest rock stars in the world. And while it is true that reinvention was more or […]
This short-ish film – 66 mins long – presented by the late and very affable Art Wood (d. 2006), brother of Ron, is recommended, especially for those interested in the early sixties London R&B scene that gave us the Stones. Very funny in parts, especially the scenes with a possibly inebriated Mick Avory (ex Kinks) […]
The Day the Music Burned — Hallucinating Woodstock at 50 — Catching up with the Woodstock nun — Designing a new 50th anniversary Woodstock recordings boxset — Michael Chiaken inside Dylan’s archive — ghoulish escapades with the Cramps in the cellars of New York’s Bowery
I really became a character in my own story. I’d go out at night, get drunk, fall asleep underneath a car. Come home with leaves in my hair, grease on the side of my face, stumble into the kitchen, bang my head on the piano and somehow chronicle my own demise and the parade of […]
‘I lead a very quiet life here,’ reports Blur’s Alex James in New World Towers, ‘then suddenly the phone’ll ring and it’s, like, oh you’re doing Hyde Park and its sold out … it’s like getting dragged off by an old girlfriend, and all mussed up and then spat back into my life again when […]
I have been thinking about time recently. Rock’n’roll and time and how integral the feeling of things accelerating were to how people must have experienced the music and its ability to constantly replenish itself, often working through formulaic patterns or variations on a theme. Consider Phil Spector who, as much as anyone in his prime, […]