C86 Show - Indie Pop

Roddy Bottum in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Royal-We-Memoir-Roddy-Bottum/dp/1636142699

THE ROYAL WE is a poetic survey of a time set in a magical city that once was and is no more. It is a memoir written by Roddy Bottum, a musician and artist, that documents through prose his coming of age and out of the closet in 1980s San Francisco, a charged era of bicycle messengers, punk rock, street witches, wheatgrass, and rebellion. The book follows his travels from Los Angeles, growing up gay with no role models, to San Francisco, where he formed Faith No More and went on to tour the world relentlessly, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, to become a queer icon.

The book is an elevated wallop of tongue and insight, much more than a tell-all. There are personal tales of historical pinnacles like Kurt and Courtney, Guns N' Roses, and recaps of gold records and arena rock - but it's the testimonies of tragedy and addiction and preposterous life-spins that make this work so unique and intriguing.

Bottum writes about his dark and harrowing past in a clear-eyed voice that is utterly devoid of self-pity, and his emboldened and confident pronouncements of achievement and unorthodox heroism flow in an unstoppable train that's both captivating and inspirational. A remarkable portrayal of a creative individual in emergence, a gay man figuring out how to be a gay man, and a detailed look at the nuance of 1980s pre-tech boom San Francisco, The Royal We will be greatly appreciated by people who loved Kathleen Hanna's Rebel Girl, Patti Smith's Just Kids, Hua Hsu's Stay True, and other memoirs about the artist's life.

Adele Bertei in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.roughtrade.com/product/adele-bertei/no-new-york-a-memoir-of-no-wave-and-the-women-who-shaped-the-scene

In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets photographer Nan Goldin - an encounter that will lead them to New York's bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max's Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.

Adele Bertei didn't just witness the No Wave explosion-she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno's assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, birthing a counterculture that fused music, art, cinema, fashion and outlaw literature into an uncompromising explosion of creativity. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists and more created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive.

Raw, gripping, and illustrated with rare photographs from personal collections, No New York is the definitive insider's account of the women who obliterated every barrier in their path, taking you deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when true expression mattered more than money or fame.

Kevin Cann in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.kevincann.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/gallery/2011/mar/09/david-bowie-in-pictures

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Any-Day-Now-London-1947-1974/dp/0955201780

Ben Cardew in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Space-Age-Batchelor-Pad-Music/dp/1916829325

http://jawbonepress.com/space-age-batchelor-pad-music/

Stereolab are one of the most fascinating guitar groups of the past fifty years, a source of constant reinvention and illuminating contrasts, where political ideology meets the sweetest pop melodies and driving guitars rub along with space-age jazz. They are perhaps the greatest Anglo-French collaboration since Concorde—a hugely respected, highly influential group whose fan base grows larger by the year, stretching from chart-topping hip hop artists to underground indie stars. And yet their appeal remains elusive. What kind of music do Stereolab make? What’s their best album? Their greatest song? There are no easy answers.

In writing this book, Ben Cardew spoke to more than fifty people from the Stereolab universe to trace the history of the band from the depths of 90s indie London to their all-conquering reunion tour of 2025. Using twenty of their songs as jumping-off points, he examines in loving detail what makes this most fascinating band work, unpicking the cultural references, stylistic contradictions, and brilliant ideas at the heart of the group.

Alexander Larman in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Lazarus-The-Second-Coming-of-David-Bowie/Alexander-Larman/9781917923446

Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie is the first biography of Bowie that tells the full and candid story of what happened in between those two apparently unbridgeable points. With new and exclusive interviews with the musicians, filmmakers and cultural figures who worked with and befriended Bowie throughout this period, Lazarus is the definitive account of the previously overlooked and fascinating latter half of a great and distinguished career. A career that climaxed with his final masterpiece, Blackstar, and the unprecedented theatrical flourish of his departure from the stage as he passed into legend.

Peter Ormerod in conversation with David Eastaugh 

In this wide-ranging biography, Peter Ormerod explores the quest for spirituality that powered David Bowie's creativity from his earliest recordings to his death-defying final album. Bowie's genre-expanding, era-crossing genius had an extraordinary impact on popular culture but his life-long search for spiritual truth and enlightenment has been overlooked.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/david-bowie-and-the-search-for-life-death-and-god-9781399422826/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bowie-Search-Life-Death

From Bowie's first musical encounters as a choirboy, this book traces his spiritual obsessions over the years. As a young musician at the start of his career, he was enraptured by Tibetan Buddhism. It was the first step in a spiritual journey that would generate his most profound lyrics and music. From the Kabbalah-influenced tracks of Station to Station to Ziggy Stardust's messiah complex and the profound affinity between Heroes and Christian thought, Ormerod sheds new light on the spiritual traditions behind Bowie's genius. 

Paul Morley in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.headline.co.uk/titles/paul-morley/far-above-the-world/9781472289506/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Far-Above-World-Space-David/dp/1472289471

A landmark exploration of David Bowie as an everlasting cultural force and change maker, by acclaimed writer Paul Morley.

In the ten years since the death of David Bowie in 2016 there has been no loss of interest in and fascination with his life, music and driven, complex personality. He is definitely one musician, one performer, destined not to be forgotten. The significant grief and sadness that greeted Bowie's death has evolved into a deeper, enduring love for his music, style, wit, artistic curiosity, sexual energy, flamboyant outsider spirit and insatiable, provocative appetite for life.

Far Above the World documents one of the UK's greatest creative artists, through the spectacularly colourful and vibrant journey of a man who constantly reinvented himself and his music. Bowie lived in the future, using the pop song to chronicle overwhelming and dangerous times, searching for the light, and creating a communication channel between post-war 20th century times and where(ever) we are now. This anniversary book will place him in the now and next, as much as is past, and argue that his songs, and his messages, reflections and warnings become ever more relevant and compelling as time passes.

Andrew Perer in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Turn-Head-Into-Sound-Valentine/dp/1916829147

Turn My Head Into Sound: A history of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine tells the story of one of the great sonic innovators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My Bloody Valentine have released only three albums in their forty-year career, but each of them has made a seismic impact. Isn’t Anything (1988) is often cited as one of the Ur-texts of shoegaze and dream rock; Loveless (1991) is an undisputed masterpiece heralded by many as the best album of the 1990s; m b v (2013) is one of the best-loved comeback albums in recent memory.

For those who know Kevin Shields and his work already, he is an indie-rock icon, but by other measures he’s still a relatively obscure figure in the musical mainstream, and to date there has been no full-length appraisal of his work or his band’s career. Until now. Shields is truly a one-of-a-kind musician, and this book—which fills in the gaps, corrects errors, and takes an objective look at the band’s entire career, warts and all—paints the full picture of one of the most revolutionary sonic artists of our time.

Turn My Head Into Sound is based on numerous interviews with people who were there (some of them speaking on the record for the first time) as well as an exhaustive archive of band-related material that the author has been assembling since 1990. Longtime fans of the band will find plenty of new information here, including the full story of the tumultuous period at Island Records following the release of Loveless. The lost years that followed would see Shields employed as engineer, producer, and remixer while also becoming an auxiliary member of Primal Scream. This book’s analysis of this diverse but lesser-known work offers reader a much fuller picture of the relentless creativity and perfectionism at the center of his process.

Guy Mankowski in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://iknowhowtolive.substack.com/p/welcome-to-i-know-how-to-live-the

Dorothy Max Prior in conversation with David Eastaugh 

https://www.roughtrade.com/product/dorothy-max-prior/sex-is-no-emergency-adventures-in-a-post-punk-wonderland

Further adventures in psychedelic rock, ballroom dancing, performance art, and parenting in 1980s Britain. Further adventures in a post-punk wonderland from the author of the acclaimed 69 Exhibition Road.

In this new volume, focusing on the 1980s, Dorothy Max Prior recalls her days as a ballroom dancing tutor in South Kensington, drumming and touring with infamous experimental pan-sexual psychedelic rock group Psychic TV, exploring London and New York City's queer clubbing undergrounds, the tangled worlds of the UK’s indie music scene at the height of its influence, performance art, and parenting.

Rob Janicke in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.robjanicke.com/

HAVE I GOT A LITTLE STORY FOR YOU...

The year was 1984. I was eleven years old and popular music was in a state of confusion. Along with songs by artists I liked such as Van Halen, Prince, Quiet Riot, Duran Duran, Billy Idol, and The Police, Top 40 radio constantly played songs from bands or artists that didn't quite do it for me. Apologies to Kenny Loggins, Phil Collins, Bananarama, Wang Chung, and Ray Parker Jr.

Due to the divorce of my parents and telling my mom that I was so unhappy that I no longer wanted to live, I was now a couple of years into therapy. It was around this time that I really began to find solace in music. The mid to late '80s gave me hope. Rap, punk rock, and alternative music befriended me at a time when I needed them the most.

A mixtape from 1989, courtesy of a high school friend, opened my soul to the music that would change my life forever- the gritty sound of grunge.

I know that this experience is not unique to me or my life. History has shown that millions of Gen X kids who were going through some heavy times in the late '80s and early '90s, found comfort in the grunge and alternative music and culture that came first from Seattle, then the world.

Music can save lives; we are proof of that. This book and that sentiment is for the SLACKER in all of us.

- Rob Janicke, author of Slacker

Howard Wuelfing in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.diwulf.com/products/available-for-presale-descenes-and-discords-an-anthology

On August 19, 2025, Descenes and Discords: An Anthology will be released, offering a powerful time capsule of the birth and early evolution of punk music through the pages of two influential fanzines: Descenesand Discords. These publications, originally printed and distributed in Washington, D.C. during the late 1970s and early 1980s, captured the raw energy, irreverent spirit, and revolutionary ethos of the underground music scene — the first locally, the second nationally.

Published by writer and musician Howard Wuelfing, Descenes was a hyperlocal chronicle of D.C.'s burgeoning punk, hardcore and new wave communities. It featured scene reports, interviews, and passionate live and record reviews of now-legendary acts like Bad Brains, Slickee Boys, and Half Japanese and dozens of others that never gained national recognition. As vital local music scenes sprung up around the country, Discords picked up the baton with a wider lens — covering bands like Black Flag, Pylon, Circle Jerks, Mission of Burma and many more, all with the same DIY authenticity and zero-corporate gloss.

Descenes and Discords: An Anthology presents full facsimiles of every issue of both zines, preserving the original cut-and-paste layouts, typewritten rants, and Xeroxed charm that defined a generation of independent media. The anthology is enriched with new commentary by Howard Wuelfing, reflecting on the zines’ creation and impact. It also includes a transcribed conversation between Wuelfing and Ian MacKaye — the iconic frontman of Minor Threat and Fugazi — where they discuss the fanzine era’s role in shaping punk’s identity and legacy. A Foreword by esteemed D.C. cultural critic, and contributor to both ‘zines, Mark Jenkins sets the historical stage for readers.

John Ellerby in conversation with David Eastaugh 

http://www.waveneyclarion.co.uk/

The Waveney Clarion was a unique publication, born of the Barsham Fairs. A monthly magazine, it hammered away for eleven years at social injustice, music, ecology, beer, art and the best type of potato to grow on your allotment.

“The beginning of the Waveney Clarion resulted from the kind of unexpected, fortuitous coincidences that don't come knocking every day, making a venture feel like it is meant to happen and cultivating a sense of inevitability.” Sandra Bell, first editor and founder of the Clarion.

Published over a tumultuous decade, the Clarion chronicled an extraordinary period from a perfectly particularperspective – the outlands of rural East Anglia, where coypu were hunted and music, fairs and the fate of our earth seemed to be the only concerns.

Mark Brend in conversation with David Eastaugh

http://jawbonepress.com/down-river/

Down River: In Search Of David Ackles is an illuminating study of mythmaking, the popular music industry, and a forgotten enigma of the 1970s.

In 1972, David Ackles’s third album, American Gothic, was released to a flurry of press plaudits declaring it to be ‘the Sgt Pepper of folk’ and one of the greatest records ever made. Yet the album, like its two predecessors, failed to sell, and after one more record, its creator simply vanished. He found work, raised a family, and died a couple of decades later, having never made another record.

Today, Ackles’s music is largely consigned to the streaming netherworld. It is yet to be properly repackaged and reappraised, and he remains largely unknown. But there is no middle ground. You either love him or you’ve never heard of him. His admirers range from Black Flag’s Greg Ginn to indie polymath Jim O’Rourke to Genesis drummer turned platinum-selling solo artist Phil Collins.

In 2003, when Elvis Costello interviewed Elton John for the first episode of his television show Spectacle, the two spoke at some length, and with palpable respect, about Ackles’s great talent, before performing a duet of his ‘Down River’—the same song Collins had selected for Desert Island Discs a decade earlier.

Joe Boyd in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.joeboyd.co.uk/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roots-Rhythm-Remain-Journey-Through

Martin Porter & David Goggin in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Buzz-Me-Inside-Record-studios/dp/0500028699

Strap yourself in and take a helter-skelter ride through more than a decade’s worth of high drama, hedonism, high tech and musical genius as told by the insiders at the heart of Record Plant studios, one of the most prolific recording factories of all time, founded in 1968 by charismatic audio engineer Gary Kellgren and ace businessman Chris Stone.

In the 1970s, Record Plant was everywhere there was music. In 1976 alone, the studios produced three No. 1 albums: Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life, The Eagles’ Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Based on the memoirs and archives of Chris Stone, as well as interviews with over 100 studio employees, music producers and recording artists, Buzz Me In tells the incredible story of Record Plant’s evolution and the making of more than a decade’s worth of Gold and Platinum albums, tape by tape.

Illustrated throughout with behind-the-scenes images, archive photos of artists recording and performing live and album cover art, this revelatory and extensively researched book explores and celebrates the way the studios were designed to cater to every rock’n’roller’s fancy. From the living-room-style studio in New York, where Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland was recorded and where John Lennon later encamped, to the VIP clubhouse studio in Los Angeles where Stevie Wonder produced his classic hits, and the destination recording venue in Sausalito where Sly Stone, Bob Marley and Fleetwood Mac holed up, each studio location had its own inherent character – but all showcased the founders’ proven formula of combining state-of-the-art audio, fantasy bedrooms and group Jacuzzis with sex, drugs and celebrity jams.

Was Record Plant ‘the real Hotel California’?

Patrick Dougher in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.godbodyart.com/new-page-3

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/patrick-dougher/concrete-dreamland/9780316571043/

https://lionsgatesound88.bandcamp.com/album/algorhythm

Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick Dougher grew up in some of the most turbulent and culturally impactful periods of NYC's history. Often neglected as a child by his parents-a father who struggled with alcohol addiction and an overworked mother who struggled to make ends meet-he learned to fend for himself. Now a renowned visual artist, musician, actor and writer, Dougher brings to the page his memories, struggles, personal revelations, and a life intimately tied to the realities of growing up Black and disenfranchised on the streets of one of the most remarkable cities in the world.

Concrete Dreamland is tragic and triumphant, gritty and hard, poetic and outrageously funny. Told in Dougher's brutally raw and courageously honest voice, these stories act as snapshots of a life lived in extremes: from gangsters to God, street style to sexuality, to recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism. He tells of his adventures as a pre-hip hop "hard rock' and an original Black punk rocker surviving during the dangerous days of the crack and AIDS epidemic in NYC, while also sharing tales of racism, homelessness, and his many brushes with fame and death.

Nancy Barile author of 'I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-and-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion' in conversation with David Eastaugh 

From Catholic school girl to glam maniac to organiser of classic early 1980s East Coast hardcore shows, Nancy Barile made her place behind the boards and right in the front row as SSD, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag wrote new rules. In the dangerous early years of punk, she rebelled, fighting for fair space as she found her purpose.

Terry Newman in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.accartbooks.com/uk/book/marilyn-monroe-style/

Marilyn Monroe Style celebrates Marilyn’s impact on fashion by revealing the influence of her many iconic looks. Her wardrobe encompassed sensual femininity as well as low-key minimalism. Outfits span from shimmering showpieces such as the Jean Louis gown worn to serenade JFK on his birthday, to Pucci slacks and cats-eye spectacles.

Born Norma Jeane Mortensen, whenever she ‘became’ Marilyn, she mesmerised onlookers with showstopping outfits that helped make her a legend, yet throughout her life the clothes she wore represented many ways of being a woman.

Written by Terry Newman – the bestselling author of Taylor Swift and the Clothes She Wears – this book tells the story of Marilyn’s life through clothes and is essential reading for Marilyn Monroe fans everywhere.

Angela Jaeger in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Feel-Famous-Punk-Diaries-1977-1981/dp/1955125570

I Feel Famous: Punk Diaries 1977-1981 is a girl’s coming of age story set to the pulse of punk rock. The book tracks 17-year-old Angela Jaeger’s exciting discovery of punk music and its accompanying lifestyle in 1977.

A music enthusiast living in New York’s East Village, Angela’s story unfolds chronologically, charting her late adolescence in tandem with her transition from observer of the nascent punk scene to eager participant. Gradually becoming a nightly fixture of her neighborhood’s vibrant underground rock milieu at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, by 1978 she had continued to fulfill her punk fantasy abroad. She followed the Clash on a tour across England, finally returning home in 1979 to start her own band. Angela encountered an impressive cast of characters on her adventures, including Lydia Lunch, Joe Strummer, Billy Idol, Klaus Nomi, and Sid Vicious.

Laced with humor and wide-eyed curiosity, Angela’s daily first-hand accounts take the reader on a personal journey not found in other punk histories. Additional commentary by the author provides context and further anecdotal material.

The text is illustrated with the visual expressions of Angela’s enthusiasm—her drawings of punk personalities and fans, previously unseen photos and ephemera culled from her personal archive—affording a unique insight into the relationship between the music, the media, and the audience.

The diaries touch on a variety of themes including identity politics, downtown NY, anglophilia, fandom, fame, and fashion. Contrasting the stark black and white of 1970s New York with the exuberant beat-up color of a decaying London and its disenchanted youth, a lost era is brought back to life through a dedicated fan’s own reportage. Creative, funny and endlessly cool, the result is an unprecedented perspective into an ever-popular moment in contemporary cultural history.