Friends, I decided to have a trip around the living room bookshelves to get some reading recommendations for you in the hope of making lockdown bearable whilst also maybe opening up a few new literary doors. Hope some of them tickle your fancy, here we go…

Music

Isle Of Noises by Daniel Rachel

The History Of The NME by Pat Long

Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley

How To Listen To Jazz by Ted Gioia

Original Rockers by Richard King

Serge Gainsbourg – A Fistful Of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

Revolution by David Quantick

Sympathy For The Drummer by Mike Edison

Darker Than The Deepest Sea by Trevor Dann

Let It Blurt by Jim Derogatis

The Manual by Jimmy Cauty & Bill Drummond

Film

Rebel Without A Crew by Robert Rodriguez

Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

Smoking In Bed by Bruce Robinson

Tales From Development Hell by David Hughes

Making It Big In The Movies by Richard Kiel

Talking Pictures by Ann Hornaday 

TV/Film

Difficult Men by Brett Martin

Room To Dream by David Lynch & Kristine McKenna

Shut It! by Martin Day & Keith Topping

Just One More Thing by Peter Falk

American Splendor Our Movie Year by Harvey Pekar

Your Face Here by Ali Catterall & Simon Wells

Humour

Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host by Garry Shandling & David Rensin

My Less Than Secret Life by Jonathan Ames

Fibber In The Heat by Miles Jupp

A Year in Cricklewood by Alan Coren

How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

Over The Limit by Bob Monkhouse

The Chic Murray Story by Andrew Mule

Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall

Fiction

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Ballad Of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn

New Grub Street by George Gissing

Bed by David Whitehouse

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Heather, The Totality by Mathew Weiner

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

Barcelona Plates by Alexei Style

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Music Memoir

White Bicycles by Joe Boyd

Memoirs of a Geezer by Jah Wobble

Things The Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett

It’s Lovely To Be Here by James Yorkston

Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

Sound Man by Glyn Johns

Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook

Bad Vibes by Luke Haines 

In The All-Night Cafe by Stuart David

Renegade by Mark E Smith

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

24 Hour Party People by Tony Wilson

I’m Not with the Band by Sylvia Patterson

Apathy For The Devil by Nick Kent

A Freewheeling’ Time by Suze Rotolo

Rock Stars Stole My Life by Mark Ellen

Lost In Music by Giles Smith

Mind/Body/Soul

The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki

Catching The Big Fish by David Lynch

London

The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher

The London Scene by Virginia Woolf

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

Soho In The Fifties by Daniel Farson

Walk The Lines by Mark Mason

Underground Overground by Andrew Martin 

Paris

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Paris The Secret History by Andrew Hussey

Paris Views by Gail Albert Halaban

Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer

In Montmartre by Sue Roe

Autobiography/Life Stories

Frank by Jon Ronson

Lady Sings The Blues by Billie Holiday

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaccson

Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

A Sense Of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle

Football

The Football Grounds Of Great Britain by Simin Inglis

Engineering Archie by Simon Inglis

A Season With Verona by Tim Parks

Football days by Peter Robinson

Calcio by John Foot