Memory Songs

This is a story about how a music-obsessed boy went from his bedroom in Hitchin to the heart of nineties London as Britpop was about to explode... We follow James Cook from his early encounters with pop’s pioneers – Revolver heard for the first time, Led Zeppelin glimpsed on evening TV – through an adolescence where taste is everything, and friendships are forged on a mutual love for the Velvet Underground, to the high-stakes gamble of moving to London, signing a record deal and releasing an acclaimed debut album with cult indie act Flamingoes.

Drawing on elements of both criticism and literary memoir, with a timeline that spans the assassination of John Lennon in 1980 and Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, Memory Songs is a testament to music’s power over the imagination. It combines James’ account of the murky years preceding Britpop with meditations on the artists who influenced the now legendaryscene he was there to witness.

Woven into this are explorations of the author’s best-loved ‘memory songs’ – those songs that seem to punctuate our lives, defining and colouring our impressions of a particular time. But the book goes well beyond autobiography to deliver an accessible, passionate analysis of the music that shaped a crucial moment in British cultural history.