I’m always a little amazed people remember so much minutia. I imagine once you get going it all comes back, but you’d expect it wouldn’t be sharp.

At any rate, this was a nice and chill, contemplative recounting of the authors life. It’s very much an assumption of the writer as to what is interesting or not; this time being you obviously want to hear about the punk rock scene in the UK and a sort of behind the scenes meets my life hooked on drugs.

That meets my expectations. It is quite candid and unapologetic (the way I expected it would be based on his personal), what-you-see-is-more-or-less-what-you-get way. He is certainly not painted in a great light, problematic in the ways you’d expect, raised in the 50s. I imagine this will put off some people. You’re not a great person if you give your girlfriend VD, invite her to move in because you feel bad, go on tour, shack up with some else, and completely ghost the ex who doesn’t know she’s an ex.

I imagine this about the same as most of these stories, a bit of embarrassing stories, wow I was an asshole, but also there’s some stuff I’ll never air and it is what it is.

It is more enjoyable because it’s read by the author and the delivery is great. It’s genuinely interesting if you’re interested in the scene or him. It’s granular in his early years and then the pacing kicks it up when he starts writing poetry and getting into the scene. It stops somewhat abruptly as he says from here on out it’s more of the same.m, which is odd because there’s none of the ‘Here’s what I became’. It’s anchored solely in growing up and professional career/ The Scene, with some personal accounting of addiction and who he was dating at the time.

It’s unnecessarily sad a bit that his more progressive thoughts and actions don’t make the cut after the most “interesting” part of his life, kind of. I suppose it might have undercut the more shitty/dramatic aspects of the narrative? Or perhaps that bits saved for another book. Who knows.