Aid Memoirs
- Dan Synge
- Jun 1
- 4 min read
A new coming-of-age memoir examines what it’s like to fall in love with music and start a band spanning the eras of glam, punk, new wave and 1980s pop. Author and musician Dan Synge’s wry and cautionary tale about trying to make it big in the music industry has been praised by stars such as Suzi Quatro, Don Letts and Living In A Box. Critics describe the book as ‘heart-breaking’, ‘honest’ and ‘unputdownable’. The Sunday Times recently called rock memoirs the ‘new lucrative trend in publishing’. So, which literary works inspired Dan to write one of his own?
DS: I suppose I was after a mix of teenage angst and gentle comedy, so the initial plan was to steer my story along the lines of: ‘High Fidelity meets David Sedaris with a side helping of Toast by Nigel Slater’. Funnily enough, I haven’t read much rock lit – mostly they’re an excuse for terrible name dropping – but I enjoyed Simon Reynolds’s book on glam rock and the memoirs of Tracey Thorn and Viv Albertine. Of course, a solid and reputable benchmark for any childhood or teen memoir would be When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison. Another of my favourites is Dear Lupin, Letters to a Wayward Son, which is both hilarious and touching at the same time. But for my memoir Whatever Happened to the Teenage Dream? I returned to some old favourites from the bookshelf in the vain hope that I might channel their engaging tone and their unique approach to storytelling.
Revolt Into Style, George Melly
In the 1980s Melly was a larger-than-life Soho character, wearing loud zoot suits and playing Trad Jazz music in pubs. Decades earlier, however, he had been a respected music critic and wrote for The Observer newspaper.
Written at the end of the 1960s, Revolt Into Style (great title!) looks waspishly back at the early days of rock and roll and particularly how this US imported culture affected the lives of British teenagers. I love the way he references Oscar Wilde and Erik Satie alongside Cliff Richard and The Rolling Stones plus his idea that early rock music was ‘an incitement to mindless fucking and arbitrary vandalism; screw and smash music’. Is it any wonder I borrowed this book from a neighbour aged fifteen and have yet to give it back!
That’ll Be The Day, Ray Connolly
When rating movies about British youth culture, critics often cite classics such as Jubilee or Trainspotting. None of these would have been made without the success, in 1973, of That’ll Be The Day, the low budget film starring David Essex set in the rough and tumble world of 1950s holiday camps.
Written by a Fleet Street journalist turned screenwriter, That’ll Be The Day was the first book I read enthusiastically from cover to cover. Perhaps it was the gritty kitchen sink realism that was absent from other books at my disposal or the fact that the protagonist Jim is in fact a nasty piece of work. Before later coming across The Catcher In The Rye or the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith, Jim was the first anti-hero I would meet in book form.
Souvenir, Michael Bracewell
Alongside That’ll Be The Day, this is one of the shortest books in my collection, yet it doesn’t suffer for its brevity. London in the late-1970s and early-1980s is the time and the place and it’s so evocative and reminds me that London was a bit of a dump back then.
Not a lot happens in Souvenir, but it brilliantly captures that moment when punk and the bands that came after it were replaced, seemingly overnight, by style and glamour. I was a teenager myself then, and can still remember this snapshot of life when earnest rock music gave way to frivolous nightclubs, fashion magazines and glossy synth pop bands.
Red Lobster, White Trash and The Blue Lagoon, Joe Queenan
I first started chuckling along to this attempt by the American writer to ‘plumb the depth of mass culture’ in 1998, and it still makes me laugh out loud. In Queenan’s hilarious quest for the low brow there are chapters on the musical Cats, the country singer Garth Brooks and a disastrous visit to a famous themed restaurant. ‘There are some things in life that you’re better off not hearing, and the TGIF list of house specials is one of them…’
All In It Together, Alwyn Turner
As an avid listener of history and politics podcasts, this brilliant dissection of the period that spans the Cool Britannia hangover and the Brexit vote got me thinking how the time my book is set in could in the same way reference more ground-breaking social and political events. Amusingly, forgotten players such as Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown and UKIP’s Robert Kilroy-Silk get an airing alongside major events like the 2008 financial crash. The footnotes are a revelation.
Whatever Happened To The Teenage Dream?
(postcards from the edge of ’80s pop)
by Dan Synge
is out now
(Rosaville Publishing)
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