Book Review

Hang the DJ

By Angus Cargill

Published by Faber

‘Lists are for fascists and shoppers, not anarchists and rockers but, if you’re reading this, you probably need all the help you can get. So here you go …’

Thus saith David Peace, respected author of The Damned Utd and Tokyo Year Zero and compiler of More Kicks than Pricks: Ten Japanese Bands I Love for No Good Reason Other than I Love Them for this fantastic volume of music trivia madness.

It’s going to be hard in a short review to do justice to the sheer joy that this book stirs in the soul of the music lover; let’s say straight off that it’s quirky (dread word), funny, nerdy, inspirational, addictive and at times just plain weird (step forward Mr Peace). In fact, I defy you to read it through in anything less than one sitting.

Read legendary music photographer Kevin Cummins’s ten photo disasters; John Kelly’s ten songs about chickens (‘sad, dark or nihilistic chicken songs simply do not exist’); Snow Patrol frontman’s Gary Lightbody ten unsettling songs for a middle-American white guy to awake to from a coma (Aphex Twin anyone? Napalm Death? Ouch).

Peter Murphy wails from the crypt with ten songs to make your skin crawl (thanks Pete for making Presley’s Blue Moon really scary …); Nick Kent gets all hirsute on us with the ten greatest moustaches in rock (shockingly, Freddie Mercury doesn't lift the trophy). There’s also a masterly rundown by Simon Reynolds (whose books about popular music include the magisterial Rip It Up and Start Again) of 33 number two singles that should have been number one — some of which were kept off the top spot by vastly inferior tracks (it still hurts to know that Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face sold more copies than Vienna by Ultravox).

It’s the narrative lists that work best in this collection. Author and musician Willy Vlautin has compiled a beautiful list of ‘ten songs/albums to listen to when you’ve just split up with your violent girlfriend and you’re too broke to live anywhere but in a camping trailer in the backyard of your friend’s house.’ You start with Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and wind up hours later listening to … well, that would be telling.

Alexandra Heminsley gives us songs for the dumped, which sounds maudlin but on closer inspection turns out to be a liberating self-help programme; and novelist Niall Griffiths gets us hog-whimperingly drunk by suggesting an initial smoky whisky sipped to the strains of Schubert Imprompus and winding up ‘grog-groggy with a head full of roaring’ as Nick Cave whips remorselessly around the turntable.

Personally, I’d like to offer heartfelt thanks to Michel Faber for rescuing Thank You – Duran Duran’s extensively panned covers album – from the dustbin of music history in his list of ‘ten reputedly worthless albums that will one day be recognised as rather nifty’: I’ve suffered a great deal over the years for my admittedly inexplicable liking for DD and Michel’s approval has helped. A bit.

So – brilliant writing about some of the most unusual, terrible, and sublime moments in pop/rock history, by some of the best contemporary writers around. What more could you want?

PS This being a book of lists, I thought I’d, um, compile a list of the artists that appear most often in Hang the DJ. It’s a close-run thing between Tom Waits, the Smiths, Bob Dylan, and Nick Cave. You can almost smell the teenage bedrooms from here …

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

If you've got a list to share, visit www.hang-the-dj.com

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