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 NME Selected as the Book of the Year 2005 "Mind opening" Time Out (UK) Selected as one of the Best Books of 2005 (fiction and non-fiction) "The last of a dying breed of music journalists who know what they’re talking about, Reynolds celebrates post-punk from The Fall to the new pop of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Read it and weep for a time when pop music had political balls and intellectual content." Uncut Selected as #2 Book of the Year 2005 (fiction and non-fiction) "Nobody navigates the complexities of rock’s dialectical processes better than Reynolds, and his account of the years following the punk revolution is typically insightful. The initial rude blast of punk was swiftly spent, he argues, descending into jerky, cartoon self-parody. But it paved the way for a golden age of alert, fiercely conscious rock bristling with irony and intelligence" The Observer Music Monthly Selected as #2 Book of the Year "The definitive account of the post-punk era and the music of that time" The Times Selected as a Music Book of the Year "A passionate account of Post Punk — not a movement exactly, but a gleefully chaotic period from 1978 to 1982 in which dub, funk, industrial and German electronic music meshed. Gang Of Four, Joy Division, Scritti Politti and the Specials jumped into the void. For fans of Jon Savage’s punk anthology England’s Dreaming, this is a natural companion." —Bob Stanley The Sunday Times Selected as a Music Book of the Year "According to Reynolds, the bold musical experiments that followed the shenanigans of 1977 have lasted better and deserve more attention. Cue this delightfully knowledgeable survey of a period of Britishi pop that rivaled the 1960s for inventiveness (synth pop, white reggae and 'industrial music' were just three of its coinages) as well as producing some of its greatest characters, including John Lydon, Mark E Smith of The Fall and Bono." —Robert Sandall The Times Literary Supplement Selected as a Book of the Year "As someone whose adolescent evenings were spent in the company of the late John Peel, I relished Simon Reynolds's companion volume Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Faber), an urgent dispatch from that brief period in popular musical history when the mainstream was colonized by the experimental and weird time-signatures and off-kilter attitudes could be found in the Top 30." —DJ Taylor James Wolcott (wolcott.com/Vanity Fair) "The two books of cultural criticism that have provided the most insight, stimulation, and reading excitement for me this year are Rip It Up by Simon Reynolds, which does for post-punk (PiL, Talking Heads, Wire, Bow Wow Wow) what Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years did for the pre-WWI French avant-garde, and Roger Copeland's Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance" The Scotsman "Reynolds emerges as that rarity among British music writers, an author capable of putting the music into a political and social context... Not just a great study of a remarkable musical era, but one of the first important historical studies of the Eighties." —Tom Lappin London Review of Books "There aren't many books about pop music as good as this one, just as there aren’t many pop eras with as much interesting unfinished business as 1978 to 1984." Pop Matters "Reynolds has a strong, distinctive voice that never gets in the way of his subject matter (a breath of fresh air amid the look-at-me verbiage that increasingly passes as music criticism). He writes incisively and thoughtfully. Although in places his discussion of artists draws on concepts from post-structuralist theory, he remains accessible to a general audience. His observations are never gratuitous or forced, always provocative and illuminating" — something that sets him apart from numerous similarly inclined critics who err on the side of obfuscation and crypto-intellectualism. Equally impressive is Reynolds' command of the basics of music writing: foremost among them, the ability simply to convey the sound of a record, something that's becoming a lost art. It's also deceptively difficult to write objectively about music with which one has grown up and which one loves. Reynolds, however, is able to step back from his subject and come at it anew. He evokes records that were admittedly his first passion, that have been written to death by others already, and articulates the sorts of nuances and pleasures that would leap out on first hearing but, for most of us, would be dulled by familiarity. Reynolds has a remarkable knack for listening afresh, defamiliarizing those sounds and then communicating them to his reader in a way that allows him/her to appreciate them again." —Alison Neale The Guardian Book of the Week "Unimprovable. With so much ground to cover, so many stories to tell... it is a wonder he has managed to produce so coherent, illuminating and readable a work as this... Reynolds's prose is very good indeed. He follows in the line of descent from Lester Bangs to Greil Marcus to Ben Thompson: startlingly thoughtful, gracefully illuminating, in command of an anarchic subject because the will, the knowledge and the technique conspire to place some kind of order on the unorderable. I had never expected there to be a book on this subject; had I done so, I would never have dared hope it could be as good as this. But then, now that Reynolds has reilluminated the period for us, shown us how fascinating and rewarding it was, I begin to suspect that, properly done, it could hardly have failed to be as good as it is. And this is very properly done indeed. You might even like it if you don't care for the music it chronicles." —Nicholas Lezard The Daily Telegraph "An exhaustive, liberating argument that this stuff matters - not just the neglected music itself, but the act of writing about music... It is rare to find a piece of music writing so sustained and so eloquent, and its appearance in 2005, two generations after the events it describes, is both well-timed and inspiring... As an account of the alternative music scene of the late 70s and early 80s, it easily achieves the definitive status it aspires to; but more strikingly it reads as a vindication of one young music fan's commitment to art that, wherever it comes from, makes sense of the world without embarrassment or compromise." —Andy Miller Artforum.com "Much like Sweet Soul Music, Peter Guralnick's history of rhythm and blues, Rip It Up is a dazzling, rich, definitive work, and I am certain that it will serve as both encyclopedia and bible on the subject for many years to come" —William Pym Artforum Scotland on Sunday "A fantastic tribute to an amazingly creative musical period. It is an instant pop classic, worthy of a place on your shelves beside the handful of music books that really matter" —John McTernan GQ "This is a monumental book, something of a labour of love for Reynolds... His success is to produce a guide that's never dry, but is instead both highly personal and authoritative--a new addition to the handful of essential pop books" —Robert Yates Record Collector "Like the bands which left its author so exhilarated over two decades ago, Rip It Up And Start Again seethes with ideas. It is, simply, one of the most convincing music histories ever written" —David Hemingway The Independent on Sunday "As monumentally entertaining an edifice of great quotes, fine critical judgements, painstaking research and elegantly traced aesthetic bloodlines as could possibly have been hoped for" —Ben Thompson Mojo "Reynolds weaves his material with a fan-like enthusiasm, great critical acuity, and sound theorizing to make an incisive, coherent and entertaining argument" —Mike Barnes Birmingham Post "Reynolds' book is obviously well researched and leaves the reader lapping up clever anecdotes about such unknown tales as the intense local rivalry between Manchester favourites Joy Division and The Fall. It also cleverly points to the prevailing trend of most of the bands to implode within just a couple of years (Talking Heads and New Order being the exceptions). Reynolds should be applauded for providing the first story of a genre which was totally confident it could invent a whole new future for music." —Neil Connor New Statesman "Prominent among those who clung to the optimism and spirit of that anything-goes futurism of the post-punk era is Simon Reynolds, who for two decades has been widely recognised as one of the best music critics on the planet... Post-punk, as the quite brilliant Rip It Up And Start Again shows, was as much about process as it was about product, about community rather than commerce. It helped nurture the subcultural spaces and networks that would sustain independent music for the next decade ... Reynolds beautifully evokes post-punk's subculture - the importance of band badges, the patronage of DJs such as John Peel, the role of shops such as Rough Trade, which distributed fanzines scribbled in bedrooms (though not before it had policed them for ideological content), and the swarm of tiny, DIY labels... Always deft of phrase and critically unpredictable... Reynolds also works in some fantastic anecdotes" —Sukhdev Sandhu Pitchfork "So damn enjoyable. Reynolds has honed his prose flint-sharp and fast-moving; even his most delicious turns of phrase... don't draw too much attention to themselves. The real attraction is the astounding amount of information the book contains... No matter how familiar you are with the period, you're bound to learn something. It's 536 pages long and I could have easily stood double that. In today's rampant soundbite culture, I can think of no higher praise." —Jess Harvell The Sunday Business Post (Republic of Ireland) "Saturated with delicious detail and coruscatingly written, Rip It Up and Start Again is a brilliant analysis of the very last time in pop music when everything really was up for grabs... His last book, Energy Flash, has become the set text on dance music and club culture; Rip It Up and Start Again will fulfil the same role for post-punk... Nobody can get inside the skin of a piece of music like Reynolds, describing it in the sort of ultra-vivid, impressionistic language that gets the song itself instantly echoing through your mind... The book teems with fascinatingly contrary and cussed individuals, many of them with large chips on their shoulders, all of them possessed of an overriding impulse to create art that would stand in a different league from formulaic three-chord stodge or chart-friendly pap..." —Jonathan O'Brien The Financial Times "Reynolds has written an immensely ambitious and impressively thorough history of a time when history was precisely what pop music was hoping to awake from" —Brian Dillon Q "*****" —Q Classic The Observer "A compelling reminder of a time when clever, mischievous, creative people formed bands--and wrote about them. Rip it up and Start Again is his most accessible book... Much of it is taken up by a detailed chronicle of the myriad bands and scenes of the late Seventies and early Eighties, the flow of ideas channelled along by traditional narrative and some magnificent research" —Kitty Empire The Times "A wonderfully rich treatise on what might be termed 'The short eighties' – stretching from 1978 to 1984 … he sounds an increasingly rare voice in pop writing, grappling with music’s subtext and hidden agendas, constantly noting that the best records ooze intellectual substance" —John Harris The Sunday Times "Reynolds has shed dazzling light on a neglected era of music... The definitive word on the subject... a brilliant job of reigniting the sense of seething potential that hung in the air like the whiff of cordite once the stereotyped attitudes of punk had finally been exorcised" —Adam Sweeting Uncut "*****" The Guardian Guide "Reynolds makes his case with expansive intelligence, pristine prose and occasional bleary wit. Anyone who claims to have read five better books about pop is mad, or a liar" —Andrew Mueller |
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