Cher, Questlove, Joni Mitchell... the 12 best music books of 2024

Because we all know the answer. A member of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre —both of whom have reformed in the past five years — Hanna details how “being onstage is the one place I feel the most me. 

But I can’t untangle all of that from the background that is male violence”. Formative to the Riot Grrl movement of the early 90s, she discusses this and more, such as her friendship with Kurt Cobain and, lightening the mood, her two-decade-long marriage with Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz aka Ad-Rock.

2. Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, Ann K Powers

50-plus years since Blue’s release, Joni Mitchell still bewitches and
entrances. She played two shows at the Hollywood Bowl in LA in
October. The podcast The Road to Joni made a road trip to those gigs, talking to famous fans and singers along the way to find out why she endures. 

Music critic Ann K Powers, across more than 400 pages, charts a similar route on the path of Joni — or Mitchell, if you prefer; what to call her is something Powers ponders. But it’s not all canonisation — Powers also examines her 1976 decision to assume a black male alter ego, dubbed Art Nouveau, appearing in blackface on the cover of the album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

3. Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove

Questlove, who has been the Roots’ drummer for almost 40 years, has hit a particularly creative peak in recent years, winning an Oscar for his 2021 documentary Summer of Soul and staging a related festival the
following summer. He’s basically a music historian at this stage and this book is pretty self-explanatory, examining 50-plus years of hip-hop. 

“No one can question the fact of
hip-hop’s birth”, he writes, “because no one can question what followed: Decades of innovation, achievement, energy, artistry, and history,
meaning decades of life.” Questlove traces its evolution to becoming the dominant genre of the 2020s.

4. Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence, Will Hodgkinson

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Lawrence popped up throughout The Creation Records Story by the late David
Cavanagh, one of our picks for best music books of 2023. He was
constantly the ‘next big thing’ until he became pop’s great also-ran, his band Felt coming close to success but never quite able to grasp it through the 1980s. But he has persevered, still making music in his 60s. Will
Hodgkinson, a journalist who wrote In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain (2022), follows Lawrence for a year, getting his idiosyncratic takes on life and ‘success’.

5. Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain, William and Jim Reid

The Jesus and Mary Chain are
another band associated with Alan McGee’s Creation Records whose
career on the label was already charted through Cavanagh’s book. You would never have guessed that the Reid brothers would still be
making music in 2024 — their eighth studio album Glasgow Eyes came out in March. In the early 1980s, they’d plot world domination from their parents’ East Kilbride council house, and when a modicum of success
arrived, they fought constantly.
Suffice to say those early shows sound electrifying. They hate music journalists — Never Understood is written with the assistance of critic and radio host Ben Thompson — and their divergent accounts are
exemplified in different fonts.

6. Hope I Get Old Before I Die:Why rock stars never retire, David Hepworth

David Hepworth, a seasoned music journalist since the 1970s, is as
reliable as Bruce Springsteen —
Uncommon People, 1971 — Never a Dull Moment, Nothing is Real; all are music books worthy of your time. Hope I Get Old Before I Die ponders why Joni Mitchell (yes, her again), Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney are more beloved than ever into their 80s. Hepworth notes that Macca was greeted as an ancient at Live Aid in 1985 — he was 43. When he headlined Glastonbury in 2022, he was a few weeks past his 80th birthday. “How did pop music, which was once
supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new, come to have such a comfortable relationship with its past?” asks Hepworth. John Fogerty, Christine McVie, Toto, and Liz Phair, all feature in this entertaining romp across the decades.

7. Cher: The Memoir, Cher

Cher and Sonny Bono’s first hit ‘I Got You Babe’ came out in 1965 and part one of her memoir takes us up to her burgeoning movie career in the mid-1980s — that’s another 40 years of her life and career to come. It just shows her resilience, her determination. She’s from a family whose history “sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel” — coming from nothing to carve a life for themselves. Born
Cheryl Sarkisian in California in 1946, her mother Georgia sought fame, driving her daughter around the country in search of it. We meet Sonny, who would become her first husband and grow ever more
controlling and abusive. An in-depth recollection — too much so at times — Cher’s memoir is over 400 pages and features Warren Beatty, Phil Spector, and Tina Turner, among many more luminaries.

8. A Thousand Threads,Neneh Cherry

Her father was jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, so Neneh Cherry found herself around music royalty regularly in her youth: Miles Davis and John Coltrane feature, as do writers James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg. Cherry was in her mid-20s and seven months pregnant with her second child when she provided one of the iconic Top of the Pops moments, appearing in the late 1980s, in gold bra and bomber jacket and Lycra miniskirt, to perform her debut solo single ‘Buffalo Stance’. There is darkness here too but as the liner jacket points out, Cherry contains multitudes: Activist, mother, daughter, lover, friend, icon.

9. In One Ear, Simon Raymonde

Simon Raymonde is many things to many people: One third of the seminal Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, he also co-founded the iconic label Bella Union in the mid-1990s. “This running a label thing was never a career path I considered,” he writes. His father is Ivor Raymonde, a producer, musician, and arranger for acts such as the Walker Brothers and songwriter for artists including Dusty Springfield, but being a child of the ‘70s, it’s no surprise to read of the inspiration of John Peel’s radio show and punk music. The title, meanwhile, is a reference to the acoustic neuroma that Raymonde developed, which has left him partially deaf.

10. You Spin Me Round: Essays on music, Edited by Adrian Duncan, Niamh Dunphy, Nathan O’Donnell

A slight book at just over 140 pages, You Spin Me Round features contributions from renowned essayist Brian Dillon (who writes fawningly of the glorious contortions of Iggy Pop), the brilliant short story writer Wendy Erskine, and various others including author Aingeala Flannery, all examining the power of differing strands of music. Tabitha Lasley, for example, waxes lyrical about ennui and excess in late nineties suburbia: “Even those of us who can remember 1999 quite well have trouble accessing the details.”

11. Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines andTomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds

The renowned music critic Simon Reynolds, known for great overviews of scenes and postulations, such as Rip It up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and Energy Flash: A
Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, collects a number of features and interviews from recent years for his latest book,
Futuromania. He sees it as a response to 2012’s Retromania.

We get epic sweeps of techno from Tokyo, the London grime scene at the turn of the century, and Kraftwerk’s future feels. It’s guaranteed that you’ll find something new to listen to in these pages.

12. Wild Colonial Boys: A Belfast Punk Story, Thomas Paul Burgess

Thomas Paul Burgess knows where his punk band lies in the great scheme of things: “My band Ruefrex, despite experiencing something like the fabled 15 minutes of fame’, is not as widely known or recognised as other Northern Irish punk contemporaries from that period — Stiff Little Fingers, the Undertones, Rudi, the Outcasts. Instead, we inherited that most bittersweet of epitaphs: ‘The best band never to have made it.’

Coming of age amid the Troubles of 1970s Belfast, Burgess, a lecturer at UCC, doesn’t hide his bitterness at what could have been, with the
deified Terri Hooley, the man behind the Good Vibrations record label, coming in for particular scorn.