Gary Marshall One of the biggest publishing success stories of the last decade has been the legal thriller where bright young turks defend truth, justice and the American way. Attorney-turned-novelist Richard Dooling has obviously spotted this and, with Brainstorm, attempts to bring some new life to the genre. In addition to the usual legal shenanigans […]
Happy Mondays : Greatest Hits
Gary Marshall At the very beginning of the 1990s, the Happy Mondays were one of the most exciting new bands around. At a time when Indie music consisted largely of floppy fringes, effects pedals and a complete absence of charisma or tunes, the arrival of a band that understood the power of the “last gang […]
Travis : The Man Who
Gary Marshall The album cover is a photograph of Travis standing in the snow wearing big coats, reminiscent of U2, but if you’re expecting an album of breast-beating stadium rock then you’ll be surprised. Fran Healy may have announced “All I Wanna Do Is Rock” on the band’s first album but “The Man Who” is […]
Laura Hird: Nail And Other Stories
Gary Marshall Rebel Inc was started in 1992 with the intention of promoting “a new wave of young urban Scottish writers who were kicking back against the literary mainstream”. Laura Hird first appeared on their “Children Of Albion Rovers” collection and Nail And Other Stories is her first short story collection for the publisher. The […]
Jonathan Hale: From A Great Height
Gary Marshall Access is always a problem for the would-be biographer and the phrase “unauthorised biography” is usually a sign of a cut-and-paste job written by a bored hack who has little or no affection for the band. The notoriously private Radiohead suffer more than most from this syndrome and a number of piss-poor biographies […]
Richard Beard: Damascus
Gary Marshall Do you remember the Fighting Fantasy books? Computer games for people whose parents wouldn’t buy them a computer, each page of a Fighting Fantasy book would end with a number of choices. If you wanted to attack the skeleton with a sword you would turn to page 33; if you wanted to scream […]
Jeff Buckley : Grace
Gary Marshall Grace was Jeff Buckley’s first fully-fledged album. It also turned out to be his last as, on 29th May 1997, he drank some wine, went for a swim and didn’t come back. As anyone who pored over “All Apologies” in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide will attest, whenever an artist dies young […]
Ben Elton: Blast From The Past
Gary Marshall If you’ve read any of Ben Elton’s previous books, you know more or less what to expect. A bit of unfunny comedy, cardboard characters and some lame political comment presented in fifty-foot letters of fire. Previously Elton shocked the world by suggesting that pollution was maybe not A Good Thing; this time round […]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was described as a spokesman for a generation and the most exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language and setting was something of a novelty first time round, Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits […]
Magnus Mills: The Restraint Of Beasts
Gary Marshall As a general rule, the more hype that surrounds a book the bigger the disappointment when you finally get to read it. And The Restraint Of Beasts has certainly been hyped. Nominations for the Booker Prize notwithstanding, we have been inundated with tabloid stories of the rags-to-riches variety describing how Magnus Mills wrote […]
Ian Rankin: Dead Souls
Gary Marshall Most police thrillers conform to a strict blueprint – a misunderstood outsider who’s willing to risk his career and his life to get his man, villains who are inevitably the personification of evil and of course a bevvy of beautiful women with a truncheon fixation. Everything is presented in stark black and white […]
Stereophonics : Performance And Cocktails
Gary Marshall “WOOOOOOAAAAARGH! GNAAAAAAAH! BLEEEEEEEURGH!” If you’re one of those people who finds Kelly Jones’ “I eat gravel, me” voice about as aesthetically appealing as nails on a blackboard, you’ll loathe this album. If on the other hand you like driving like a maniac and bellowing at the top of your lungs to whatever’s on […]
Blur : 13
Gary Marshall There’s a theory that this is a terrible time for music. Everything’s been done and all that’s left for us is pale imitations of what’s gone before, an Orwellian vision of Beatles-influenced nonentities stomping on human ears for all of eternity. Blur, I think, would disagree – after all, there are very few […]
Luke Sutherland: Jelly Roll
Gary Marshall Irvine Welsh has a lot to answer for. In much the same way as British gangster movies made everyone associate the east end of London with long coats, guv’nors and shootahs, Scotland is now inextricably linked with drugs, swearing and psychopaths. With a glut of Trainspotting wannabes hitting the shelves over the last […]
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Gary Marshall Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with the Internet, “Underworld” is not a book for the faint-hearted. Elegiac in tone and described variously as DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty 827 pages and zips back and forwards in […]
P.J. O’Rourke: Eat The Rich
Gary Marshall P.J. O’Rourke has never been afraid to tackle big subjects. Previous books have attempted to explain the entire US Government, refute the arguments of the environmental lobby, and describe the bits of the Gulf War that CNN wouldn’t broadcast. With his latest book, “Eat The Rich”, PJ sets his sights on possibly the […]
