About

Rockshelf is a collection of novels about popular music.
I'd recently finished Chris Brookmyre's Dead Girl Walking, then seen a tweet by the author saying that his fictional band Savage Earth Heart sounded like Jimmy Eat World crossed with Karine Polwart. Having imagined them to be a bit like The Waterboys (not least because their name is from a Waterboys' song), this seemed perfectly acceptable and didn't jar with my mental impression.

I was reminded - though they are very different novels - of Iain Banks' novel Espedair Street. Banks had said that ex-Marillion man Fish somewhat informed his anti-hero Weird (though his 1970s band Frozen Gold gave the impression of being more Fleetwood Mac than Marillion).

I started wondering how many other novels featuring fictional bands there were, and who those acts' real world inspirations might be.This isn't to suggest that there aren't plenty of fictional acts that aren't inspired by anyone, but like real world pop stars, most probably started out influenced by someone else.

There was VTO from The Ground Beneath Her Feet (clearly U2), The Grams from Powder (confirmed by the author to be substantially based upon The Verve) and The Lazies (possibly inspired by The Cardigans) from Kill Your Friends, and the same book's Rage, who was definitely Goldie. I asked on Facebook, and a few more came to light, some of which I should already have remembered, some new to me. Hmmm. I did some more digging, and the more I dug, the more I wanted to read some of these novels. And I thought that if I did, others might too. 

The trouble was, finding any sort of authoritative list of novels set in the world of popular music was difficult.

What I wanted was a resource documenting these books; The Best Novels About Popular Music In The World Ever, perhaps? Now That's What I Call Novels About Popular Music?

The mainstream press seem to run an article about the best fictional bands/the best novel about popular music every few years. One wonders whether the high degree of similiarity in their top tens genuinely reflects literary/musical merit or a degree of cribbing. Whatever the reason, the pool from which their lists are drawn seems rather shallow.

With a little digging it was possible to turn up a few sites with information about a few more books, but none of them quite did what I wanted. Some of them (Trash Fiction, Clinton Walker) had a lot of detail about a few books, but weren't remotely comprehensive.

GoodReads, by contrast, can pull up a keyworded booklist with several hundred entries on it, of which many are either incorrectly tagged, or barely deserve the description given to them. I could find a few reading lists put together by libraries, but all had long since been removed by their owners, and The Wayback Machine was of limited help in bringing them back. One extremely useful list I found was by Bookslut. From 2005, it listed 50 novels, of which about two thirds were new to me.

After I'd decided there was a niche for this blog - indeed after I'd already written and published over 100 entries and written the first version of this 'About' page - I discovered
Rock of Pages and I nearly scrapped the whole thing. It does what I wanted my blog to do.

But then I looked at it closely. I looked at their definitive list and nearly all of the books I'd collected info on weren't on there. A lot of their entries look an awful lot like slashfic, they're very largely US-based and their focus wasn't where mine was, so I feel there's room for both sites.


To repeat what I said in my opening line, this site is for 'a collection of novels about popular music'. That can be interpreted in a number of ways, and I can't pretend that it's not going to be subject to my own whim.

Entry Criteria

Broadly the criteria for entry is as follows:


1) In which a fictional group or artist features prominently: Espedair Street, Powder or The Exes all qualify on this basis. There are plenty of novels where a minor character is a musician of some sort, but this collection is focused on where the musician or band is a significant character. So yes, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy's Disaster Area is an ommission, but deliberately so. Perhaps I'll put up a page of these kinds of acts at some point in the future.

2) Where popular music is of direct importance to the plot or setting of a novel. So, Haruki Murakami's Norwgian Wood qualifies by dint of how central The Beatles' song is to the plot, despite not having any fictional bands in it, and Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints qualifies by being so firmly set in the New York straight edge scene.

Exceptions

If one searches for novels about popular music, it isn't long before you discover a large number of Kindle-only novels with heavily Photoshopped covers, an author's name that sounds like someone that failed the audition for Faster Pussycat and almost invariably badged something along the lines of '(Really Naughty Girls on Tour, #17)'. As far as I can tell, they're essentially Mills and Boon crossed with 50 Shades plus added rock stars. I won't be adding them.
I'm not excluding them out of prudery; you can hardly document fiction based in the popular music world and not expect sex.

So why am I excluding them?


I'm fully aware that not every book about music is going to be a great work, so clearly literary merit can't be the criteria for inclusion (unless one wants a very short list indeed). The 1950s in particular saw plenty of pulp fiction churned out about the rock 'n' roll phenomenon, and I certainly wouldn't exclude them on quality grounds. And I am including some pretty dodgy-sounding rock stars as vampire nonsense.

I certainly don't have an objection to including romance novels on the blog if they're grounded in the world of popular music. However, there are more of these 'sexy rock stars and the women that love them' things than there are Hawkwind compilations, and I have no intention to cataloguing them. It would take for ever, they give every impression of being horrible, and most important of all, I get the feeling the setting is pretty much inconsequential.

I certainly don't give the merest quantum of a shit what they're like, and I doubt anyone will care (with the possible exception of Zadie Spandex, author of Naughty Rock Chicks #1-75), so they're excluded. If you do care, Rock of Pages does catalogue these things.


I have also excluded novelisations of screenplays, musicals etc, so sorry, but Breaking Glass, Expresso Bongo and even Quadrophenia don't get in. Original works only, I'm afraid.

The Devil Is In The Detail

The further back you go, the harder it is to find much in the way of biographical details - unless you actually own the book, of course. For 1958's The A&R Man by Robert Hancock, for instance, I was reduced to cribbing from the notes of Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles - All These Years - Extended Special Edition: Volume One: Tune In. There are many pulp novels about the world of pop of the 1950s and '60s for which I suspect it's difficult to find much more than the occasional mention in an online list and a cover scan if you're lucky, and finding the jacket blurb is nigh on impossible.


I am attempting to collect these books as I discover them, and will try to add reviews to each one I read. Many I already own or have already read, but some were a long time ago and a review without a re-read isn't likely to be particularly informative.

The collection is certainly nothing like definitive now, and never will be, but it is my intention to collect as many relevant novels in this blog as possible. If you spot an obvious omission, please contact me and let me know, and I'll do my best to ensure it gets added and a spotter's credit included.

Do also like our Facebook page where new additions will be added: https://www.facebook.com/rockshelf1/


I hope you enjoy the site!

Regards,

The Head Librarian, Rockshelf

A Note on Blog Post Dates

Novels are posted according to their original publication date, from newest to oldest. In some cases it's not possible to be sure of the exact date or indeed even a month, in which case I've made a best guess based on the earliest reviews I can find and other biographical information.

Additionally, Blogger won't allow posts prior to 1970. Consequently, anything that appears to have been posted in 1970 may either actually be a book published in that year or from a prior year. This is clearly rather unsatisfactory, but the year of publication is still identified in the individual blog posts.

A Note on Music Genre Labels
All the novels have music genre labels attached. I have necessarily been broad in applying these in order to generate sensible groups of similar books, without needlessly overcomplicating things by having hundreds of micro-genres.

Jennifer Whiteford's Grrrl is clearly set in the 'Riot Grrrl' scene, but is labeled as 'Alternative Rock' as I think more people would search for the latter than the former. Where a novel straddles two genres, for example,
Tiffany Murray's Diamond Star Halo about a blues-rock band, I have labelled it both 'Blues' and 'Rock'.

Genre labels are always somewhat arbritary anyway, and this is certainly the case where I have not read a book and am having to try and work out which best fits.


A Note on Amazon Links


There are Amazon links for the books on this site. If you click on one of them and end up buying something on Amazon, I get a small proportion. It might buy me a book one day. If you're not keen, don't click 'em.

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