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Art is everything you don't have to do. Brian Eno ‘BBC John Peel lecture - 2015’

I was recently introduced to someone, with the person do the introducing stating, “He is a musician too.” I was caught unaware. It felt strange. Yes, I play music, casually, whether it be tinkering with guitar and electronic instruments, but I have never labelled myself or identified as a ‘musician’. Especially reading how Tom Morello describes a musician, that is certainly not me:

“I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them. I see [Tom’s 2018 all-star solo album] The Atlas Underground as a Trojan horse. I want it to turn a new generation of kids on to cranking up the guitar.”

Source: Tom Morello: “Metal will be here long after other genres have come and gone” by David Everley

While reading memoirs by composers such as Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, I often feel out of my depth. They live in a world of musical theory, whether it be counterpoint or rhythm, that feels foreign to me no matter how many Jacob Collier or Andrew Huang videos on I watch. I get it, but I do not really get it. If I was using a Solo Taxonomy, I would be ‘Relational’. (Sadly, there was no discussion of circle-of-fifths in my guitar lessons growing up, while I definitely cannot sight read. If I had to I could find my way through music notation, by it would be somewhat laborious.) Clearly I know stuff, I am comfortable finding the chords to a song to accompany my children, but it does not feel that proficient or ‘Extended Abstract’.

In regards to performance, I remember reading Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller where he reflected on the difference between being a live musician as opposed to a session musician. On the high-tension recording sessions for The Colour and the Shape, he made the decision to re-record William Goldsmith’s drum parts as they were missing something. Grohl explained how the “session” mindset as one of surgical precision and perfection, often influenced by the intense pressure of a producer (in this case, Gil Norton). He noted that while a drummer can be incredible in a live setting, carried along by energy, vibe, and the visual performance, the studio is a microscope. In this world I am all vibe and could not even imagine playing with any semblance of the studio precision.

This tension between ‘vibe’ and ‘precision’ left me wondering: if I am not a ‘musician’ in the clinical sense, what am I doing when I pick up the guitar or play the synthesiser? It had me looking past the mechanics of music and toward the fundamental nature of being creative.

In the 2015 John Peel Lecture, Brian Eno challenged the idea that the arts are merely a secondary “luxury” compared to STEM fields, instead asking the fundamental question: “Is art a luxury, or does it do something for us beyond that?” To structure the conversation, he provided a broad definition of art.

Art is everything you don’t have to do.

Source: BBC John Peel lecture – 2015 by Brian Eno

While we must eat and move to survive, the way we style our food or the way we dance are the essential stylisations that make us human. Just as children learn through play, Eno argued that adults create little worlds through art, immersing ourselves in alternate realities that act as a psychological flight simulator.

Children learn through play, but adults play through art. So I don’t think we stop playing. I think we just carry on doing it, but we do it through this thing called ‘art’. And so the reason I made that big list of things – which could, of course, have been endlessly long – was because I want to say that all of those things, from the most exalted (with inverted commas) like symphonies, to the most mundane like cake decoration or nail painting or something like that, they are all doing the same thing. They are all the construction of little worlds of some kind.

Source: BBC John Peel lecture – 2015 by Brian Eno

These spaces therefore provide a safe place for interesting experiences, allowing us to explore the joys and freedoms of a false world so we can better navigate the complexities of the real one. In our modern era, where we are all specialists now and often isolated in our professional silos, Eno sees art as a vital cultural ritual we are contributing too.

Coming at the question of art from a different perspective, Brené Brown talks about the importance of play and creativity as being essential to embracing a full and rich life. For Brown, play is doing things with no goal other than enjoyment.

Opposite of play is not work, it is depression.

Source: Dr. Stuart Brown

She argues that there is no such thing as “creative” and “non-creative” people. Instead, there are those who use their creativity and those who do not. The problem is that unused creativity is not benign, instead it metastasises into shame, grief, judgment, and resentment.[1] When we play, we loosen our grip on perfectionism. When we create, we practice being vulnerable. Together, they form a “rebound” effect – the more you play and create, the more resilient you become to the shame triggers of the outside world.

To create is to make something that has never existed before. There is nothing more vulnerable than that.

Source: Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Brown argues that we often stop using our talent to avoid the feeling of being “flawed.” This can stem from a paralyses associated with a memory of an experience where somebody told us that we are not very good.

I felt this paralysis a few years ago, when I sold my gear in the name of seriousness. The mixers and synths I had bought over time – a Roland MC303 and a Korg MicroKorg – felt like clutter in a life that no longer had ‘room’ for them. I kept my guitars, but in letting go of the electronic tools, I did not realise I was amputating a part of my identity.

The ‘condition’ of creativity does not just go away because you clear the desk space. It is for this reason I eventually found myself re-purchasing various pieces of kit, including a Roland MC-101 and an Arturia Microfreak. The challenge now is not about having the ‘stuff’, it is about finding the time to do stuff with no purpose or guilt.

Coming at the question of talent from a different angle, Michel Faber, in his book Listen – On Music, Sound and Us, devotes a chapter to asking whether everybody can sing. He explores the limits we place on ourselves and others. This might include such constraints as physiology, health, age, training, and temperament which set boundaries on how and what you can sing well. In the end, Faber concludes that everyone can sing, the challenge is often about finding “what your voice was meant to sing.”

How many people are born to sing superbly? Not many, I suspect. As many as are born to compete in the Olympics, perhaps, or play professional tennis. The others make do with what they’ve got, and sometimes manage to turn their humdrum pipes into distinctive, emotive instruments which compensate for their lack of might and purity with bags of character.

Source: Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber

To extend Faber’s argument that singing is often about finding what is right, I wonder if being creative in general is about finding what your creativity was meant to create?

With Eno, Brown and Faber in mind, I wonder if the issue with being a “musician” is as much mindset? Yes, I could be more proficient and I could spend more time practicing.[2] However, neither of those aspects prevent me from being a musician?

Listening to people like Adrian Sherwood or Jamie Lidell talk about music, I realise that maybe it is not always about proficiency in theory or even technique. Or maybe proficiency comes in different shapes and sizes? For example, in Jamie Lidell’s conversation with Kieren Hebden (FourTet) on the Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast (Episode 78), the two dive deep into the philosophy of creation versus the mechanics of gear. While both are known for their technical wizardry, the discussion regarding technical proficiency was somewhat subversive. Hebden made the case that technical proficiency is not about knowing every tool, but about mastering a specific, often limited, workflow until it becomes like an extension of your body.[3] Hebden also shared that he lacks a strong background in formal music theory. He views this not as a deficit, but as a technical advantage. By not knowing the “correct” way to resolve a chord or build a scale, he allows for more serendipity and “happy accidents.” Sometimes deep theoretical knowledge can lead to predictable results, whereas Hebden’s “weakness” forces him to rely on his ears and taste.[4]

Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas touch on the formal theory dilemma in their book This Is What It Sounds Like. In talking about authenticity in music, they contrast the ‘naive’ music that comes from the heart as opposed to ‘cerebral’ which comes from the head. They given the example of The Shaggs as being from the heart, whereas Sebastian Bach being from the head.

The naïve, below-the-neck authenticity of the Shaggs reminds record makers of what honest, uncorrupted feeling sounds like. I’ve listened for it in every record I’ve made since I first heard Philosophy of the World.
The opposite of naïve music is sometimes called “cerebral” music. Composers and performers of this kind of music express their feelings using deliberate principles and well-honed craftmanship. Johann Sebastian Bach is a good example. His music communicates a wide array of potent emotions, from dramatic expressions of triumph and sadness to more nuanced feelings of longing and spirituality. He accomplishes this feat not by spontaneously expressing the tides of his heart but by carefully deploying a well-honed arsenal of polished techniques. Simply put, Bach could authentically express sadness without being sad. Musically untrained listeners can experience the sadness (or joy or anger) of Bach’s music in an immediate and intimate way, while a musically trained listener can deconstruct Bach’s methods and identify the specific compositional techniques he used to achieve his emotional effects.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like : What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

What is significant is that both The Shaggs and Bach are musicians and authentic, but following different paths to achieve this. The question then is whether being a musician or an artist is about what what is actually done or produced?[5]

In Julian Barnes’s memoir on death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, he argues that art serves as a means of escaping death.

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers – two or three if lucky – which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson unpacks a number of myths associated with technology. One point that comes up again and again is the way in which technology can extend us and how it already is. A particular example of this is the way in which the internet and blogging can help clarify our thinking.

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Source: Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter – How Successful Networks Nurture Good ideas by Clive Thompson

Austin Kleon extends on this idea of figuring out what we think in his discussion of portals.

You step into the portal and sometimes discover what you didn’t know want to know.
That is the gamble. The roll of the dice.
A book is the safest portal, and a diary is the second-safest portal. They are both private. When it comes to public portals, a blog, I think, is one of the safest, most forgiving portals.

Source: Stepping Into the Portal by Austin Kleon

What each of these things touch upon is something done. This reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s discussion in The Human Condition of the labour required to make thinking tangible:

If labor leaves no permanent trace, thinking leaves nothing tangible at all. By itself, thinking never materializes into any objects. Whenever the intellectual worker wishes to manifest his thoughts, he must use his hands and acquire manual skills just like any other worker. In other words, thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the “content” of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage. The work itself then always requires some material upon which it will be performed and which through fabrication, the activity of homo faber, will be transformed into a worldly object. The specific work quality of intellectual work is no less due to the “work of our hands” than any other kind of work.

Source: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

My wonder of such labour is whether art without something to show for itself is really art? Or to come back to music? If musician plays music in the forest and nobody hears them, did they really play?

During a discussion of USB002 by Fred Again … on the TapeNote podcast, Fred Gibson made the remark that he estimates only 2% of the work that he creates actually gets published. Some of this is unfinished ideas, while some is work done producing for other artists. Is this then the reality of the labour associated with art and music? Although there is validation in publishing something, this is never the measurement of the final outcome.

Coming back to Austin Kleon, he makes the case against publishing everything, suggesting that it is important to have a private space left fallow.

I find that my diary is a good place to have bad ideas. I tell my diary everything I shouldn’t tell anybody else, especially everyone on social media. We are in a shitty time in which you can’t really go out on any intellectual limbs publicly, or people — even your so-called friends! — will throw rocks at you or try to saw off the branch. Harsh, but true.

Source: Why I keep a diary by Austin Kleon

Thinking about the perspective of the musician, I wonder what happens if something is not finalised or published? Some musicians spend their whole life dedicated to mastering the works of others. Maybe then it is all simply about a deliberate process? To come back to Brown, maybe it is about enjoyment? Maybe, as Prince suggested, it is about a higher truth?

Try to tell me how to paint my palace
That isn’t where it’s at
That’s like trying to tell Columbus that the world is flat
If the song we’re singing truly is the best
Then that, my brothers, is the ultimate test

Source: Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got by Prince

Looking back at that moment of being introduced as a “musician,” I feel that my initial discomfort stemmed from a binary view of talent. However through the lens of Eno’s “flight simulators” and Brown’s “vulnerability” a third path emerges. The reality is that being creative is not a status that is just conferred by a degree or a 500-page theory book. It is, as Hannah Arendt suggests, the “work of our hands” to make the intangible tangible. Whether that work reaches an audience of thousands or remains fallow, the act itself can be considered as the definitive marker.

  1. In an interview with Zan Rowe, Damon Album describes creativity as a condition. Coming from Brown’s perspective, maybe it is a condition we all have that we either embrace or let it transform into something else. ↩
  2. I wonder if Chris Hemsworth learning to play drums for Ed Sheeran in the documentary series Limitless demonstrates what is possible with time and effort. ↩
  3. Fred Again makes a similar point during a TapeNotes interview, suggesting that what matters it liberating your mind. “You want to do the things that liberate your mind to be hearing well, not whether or not [you’re using] this compressor or this distortion or this distortion… the thing that’s most dangerous about getting into that is that you’ll forget about whether or not the chorus is wrong, or whether or not the chord progression is actually not serving the feeling right.” ↩
  4. Hebden also highlighted that a different kind of “proficiency” comes from active listening. He mentioned his practice of listening to a full album every single day. For him, the “technical” work of a producer is 90% training the ear to recognize what makes a record “sit on the shelf” next to the greats, rather than learning how to use a new plugin. ↩
  5. On The Next Big Idea podcast, Susan Rogers provides a different perspective on the above and below argument, touching on the ease and accessibility of creating and being a musician. “It’s becoming less of a refined art and more of a practical utility in our lives. This, by necessity, will change music’s form. Producers will be making records that are a little bit more utilitarian.” ↩
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Listeners are an essential part of the endless cycle of music because all music makers start out as listeners. Out of that listening are birthed singers, dancers, performers, composers, DJs, record executives, technical innovators, sound designers, and record makers, all eager to show the next generation, This is what it sounds like . . . to me. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas ‘This Is What It Sounds Like’

In This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, Susan Rogers (along with co-author Ogi Ogas) provide a scientific scaffolding for experience of falling in love with a song. At the heart of the book is the Listener Profile, a methodical framework that categorises our musical “sweet spots.” Rogers breaks down the listening experience into seven primary dimensions:

  • The “What”: Melody, Lyrics, Rhythm, and Timbre.
  • The “How”: Authenticity, Novelty, and Realism.

While Rogers’ background as a cognitive neuroscientist shines through, she balances this with various “behind the desk” anecdotes from her time engineering for Prince during the Purple Rain era and her work with Geggy Tah and Barenaked Ladies. These snippets provide a necessary human pulse to the clinical approach.

One of the interesting aspects was Rogers’ discussion of novelty and our appetite for musical risk. This is captured by a novelty–popularity curve: simplest, most familiar music on the left; boundary‑pushing, complex music on the right; sales/popularity on the vertical axis. This curve is ever evolving and what might be considered complex today, can easily become more familiar in the future.

Though its shape remains the same from generation to generation, the curve itself slides steadily to the right along the axis of novelty as different musical innovations become commonplace. The peak of the curve – along with the most popular style of music -retains a balance of familiar and novel elements, but what those elements sound like changes as audiences get accustomed to musical advances.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I could not help but draw parallels to Raymond Williams’ theory on cultural evolution:

  • Dominant: The music that defines the current “mainstream.”
  • Residual: The sounds of the past that still shape our present.
  • Emergent: The new, “novel” expressions that push boundaries.

Rogers argues that our “Record Producer Brain” is constantly scanning for these elements. However, taste is rarely static. You might find that your profile shifts as you age or changes depending on your social environment. This fluidity suggests that the Listener Profile is not a fixed DNA sequence, but a living document that evolves with our life stages.

The identities we construct for ourselves are reflected in the things we collect and like, so much so that when we unveil a drastic change in the food we eat, the hobbies we enjoy, or the genres of music we’re into, people who know us understand that something important about our identity has changed. Empirical research has shown that our conception of personal identity is linked to our musical choices.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

Another thing that stood out was tension between Rogers’ profile and the concept of guilty pleasure. When we align Rogers’ science with Donald Winnicott’s concept of the True Self and False Self, a “guilty pleasure” is often just a conflict between our True Self (the raw, emotional response to a melody) and the False Self (the persona we present to fit social expectations). Rogers’ intent with the framework is to provide the structures required to strip away the “False Self” and understand why a specific timbre or rhythm resonates with us, regardless of its perceived “coolness.” It was interesting thinking about this alongside Chilly Gonzales’ Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures and how it comes to grips with personal taste.

During quiet moments in the studio, I enjoyed asking record makers to name a guilty pleasure—a record you would be embarrassed to admit you liked. Such confessions can be deeply revealing. The records we treasure covertly reflect facets of our musical self that we’d just as soon not have others know about.

Source: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

I was once told that “no one likes your music.” Of course, the comment was said in spite, but ironically it is true for when it comes to the Listener Profile, we are all unique, there is no average. As a combination of neurological wiring, personal history, and emotional associations, our relationship with a song is unique.

If Michel Faber’s Listen – On Music, Sound and Us is a soulful, visceral exploration of the act of hearing, Rogers’ work feels like its intellectual counterpart – an exploration written “from the head up.”

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The start of any set is like treading water. You have to keep people in the room without burning through the big songs. And this is the DJ’s dilemma. Mark Ronson ‘Night People’

Night People is deliberately “the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for”. It is not about the super‑producer, winning Grammys, but about the working DJ who spent years “lugging crates into bars and nightclubs,” reading rooms and igniting the dance floor.

Throughout, Ronson is candid about drugs and nightlife excess. He provides accounts of mixing substances at Tunnel, accidentally taking heroin, watching people slip into K‑holes, and showing how thrilling and grim that world could be at the same time. He claims that it was anxiety and panic attacks that seemingly saved him from addiction.

The book is equally honest about the world of access and privilege he grew up in. From the rock‑star stepfather, Mick Jones, who was the lead guitarist in Foreigner, with crates of funk and soul he can quietly “borrow,” the mother who bought him Technics on condition he got into college, a trust‑fund safety net set up by his grandfather, and the general proximity to fame. With all this, Ronson is often modest about DJing and the side‑doors that this privilege seemingly opened, such as getting straight into Peter Gatien’s Club USA while others grind for years.

For most DJs, getting into Gatien’s clubs meant years of playing tiny bars and dimly lit backrooms before earning a spot at Club USA. I should have needed that long—building connections, making my way up gradually. Instead, I stumbled right into it. I already had advantages that most others didn’t. My mother bought me the gear. I was raised by a musician with a home studio. But this was an absurdly lucky break, even for me. The thought of playing Club USA was surreal. I felt way too green for such a big stage. But no way was I turning it down.

Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

What I found interesting about the book was how Ronson took us behind the decks of a seemingly lost art. He recounts the experience of buying his first decks at Rock and Soul, figuring out how it all works, learning to read different rooms and audiences, building sets by BPM on sticky labels, bombing, biting, improving, and slowly earning respect. I was particular interested in his experience phoning an older classmates, Manny Ames, for scratching lessons.

“You got any stickers?”
I scrambled for some Maxell cassette labels. He peeled them off casually and showed me how to mark up two copies of the same record by attaching the sticker from the center hole outward, like the needle on a compass.
“This way you’ll always know where you are visually while you’re running two records back and forth,” he said, sharing something both straightforward and mind-blowing.
The stickers allowed him to spin the record back to precise spots—2 o’clock, 7 o’clock, etc.—by tracking each revolution of the disc. Each position on the clock face corresponded to a specific sound: the kick drum might be at 3 o’clock, the snare hit at 9 o’clock, making it possible to consistently find and repeat any part of the beat.


Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this insight, Ronson demonstrates that success is hours, not magic.[1] This included eight gigs a week, carrying endless demo tapes in his pocket, playing Tuesday nights in tiny rooms. Ronson calls out the place of effort and practice after watching DJ AM re-order lyrics using two records.

“Dude. How’d you learn that shit??!!” I asked, still trying to process.
“Man… just been in the crib watching old DMC battles and teaching myself the routines. Crazy what you can do when you quit smoking crack.” He gave a gallows chuckle and took a drag of his cigarette.
Looking at the scattered VHS tapes and overflowing ashtrays, I said, “I guess it helps you haven’t left this room in a year,” half joking, half in awe.


Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

With this recognition of effort, Ronson rues this lost world, an era where endless hours would be spent crate‑digging and obsessing over pressings and B‑sides. He contrasts this with his modern setup of a laptop running Serato. Although this change affords new creative possibilities and relief for his own aging body, but there is also something lost in working within the constraints of physical, story‑filled crates and mildew‑stained sleeves.

I haven’t DJed with records in years. Instead, I use Serato, software that lets me manipulate songs on my laptop via turntables and CD players. Instead of crates, I have a MacBook. My back thanks me, but the truth is, I’m not the DJ I used to be. Back then, limited by crate space, I’d sit on my apartment floor crafting my entire set beforehand, agonizing over every choice. Should I pack the hefty double-disc Classic Funk Mastercuts or the equally bulky Classic Jazz-Funk Mastercuts? Asking myself, will the crowd be funky or jazz-funky? Do I bring the Isley Brothers’ Go for Your Guns, with the all-time slow jam “Footsteps in the Dark (Parts 1 & 2),” or their album The Heat Is On, which has “Fight the Power” and “For the Love of You”? Now, with Serato, I rock up to the club with the entire history of music under my arm. But the sheer number of choices is paralyzing. With seconds left on Drake and Wizkid’s “One Dance,” I frantically scroll through thousands of tracks and land on “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash purely because the computer says they’re both 104 BPM. Meanwhile, these songs have as much in common as a goldfish and a lampshade.


Source: Night People by Mark Ronson

Along with insight into DJing, Ronson takes us into a pre‑gentrified New York, with grimy clubs, record stores, basements and lofts, club‑kid Times Square, and a nightlife ecosystem (promoters, doormen, record‑company promo guys, bouncers) that feels both hyper‑specific and now mostly gone.[2] With this there is a lot of name dropping. However, it feels different in tone to say Moby’s memoir Porcelain as I would argue that Ronson is placing himself in other people’s orbit, not vice versa.

On side note, Ronson’s acknowledgments at the end of the book spell out his writing process in a way that could be seen to mirror his crate‑digging. Inspired by the realisation that memories and people were starting to fade, he interviewed hundreds of DJs, promoters, dancers, doormen, bouncers to reconstruct a vanished. However, more importantly, in calling out this process he recognises that the number of people and choices involved in any creative art. Something that it is easy to forget at times.

Overall, Night People provides an insight into not only Mark Ronson, but a world now seemingly lost. For me it sits alongside Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with the album Only the Shit You Love and Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop. Each have a penchant for the small incidental stories, always wary about getting too Glenn A Baker. Although he has discussed this world in the past (see his Crate Diggers interview for Fuse), the book goes into more detail. It was also made even better having it read by Ronson himself, which I found via Libby.

  1. This reminds me of a comment from Tom Morello and the willingness to practice: “I’m disgusted by the fact that a lot of young people these days aren’t willing to sit down and practise the electric guitar for eight hours a day. They are all looking for an easier route to becoming famous. Look at the Top 50 songs on the radio in the US – there are no guitar solos in them.” ↩
  2. It is interesting to contrast Ronson’s New York with Phillip Glass’ New York as detailed in his autobiography Words Without Music in which he lived in a loft on 22nd Street. I guess the reality is places never stay the same? ↩
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What you can’t find out, and where that leaves you, is one of the places where the novelist starts. Julian Barnes ‘Nothing to Be Frightened Of’

Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confounded my expectations of autobiography. I had naively‑imagined a cradle‑to‑career narrative, where it begins with or before birth and proceeds from there. Instead, Barnes assembles something more fragmentary and different. It is a book that has all the usual autobiographical ingredients, discussion of his grandparents, parents, brother, and childhood incidents, but this is all constantly rearranged around a single gravitational force: death.

Throughout, Barnes provides a narrative with multiple threads weaved together like a tapestry that at a distance creates a coherent picture, but at its core is full of contradictions. For example, a childhood story about his grandparents’ duelling diaries comes up again and again, with his grandfather’s record of “Worked in garden. Planted potatoes” counted by his grandmother’s “Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden”. Elsewhere he contrasts his own “colouring in” of memories with his philosopher brother’s suspicion of memory altogether:

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

The focus on death also extends to discussion of free will, evolution, the brain, and religion. Barnes makes those extensions explicit. At one point he asks whether his “death‑awareness” is bound up with being a writer, and imagines a doctor offering him a brain operation that would remove his fear of death at the cost of removing his desire to write:

We have devised a new brain operation which takes away the fear of death … you’ll find that the operation will also take away your desire to write.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Late in the book he reflects on genetic inheritance and free will when he notes, almost dryly, that aspects of his and his brother’s mannerisms—“the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw … a particular kind of polite laugh”—are “definitely not expressions of free will” but “genetic replicas” of their father. Here I am reminded in some ways of Christos Tsiolkas’ lecture on doubt, fence-sitting and the importance of questioning:

I’m not proposing we always sit on the fence. However, I am suggesting that as writers, playwrights, intellectuals, we are required to doubt and we are required to question.

Source: 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture: Christos Tsiolkas by library.gov.au

Stylistically, the book feels as much like fiction as his novels feel like non‑fiction. Barnes argues that the novelist is someone who lives in the blur between memory and invention:

A novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Throughout, he keeps crossing the line between essay and story, memory and scene. It reads like an autobiographical novel that is honest about its own constructedness and place in time.

I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

These authorial asides reminded me of Paul Auster’s games in The New York Trilogy. They make the memoir feel self‑consciously written, as if the subject is not just death, but the sheer artificed nature of any story we tell about it.

Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Along with Barnes’ self-conscious style, chronology is repeatedly sacrificed throughout to theme. Interestingly, stories are actually often repeated, with a slight tweak each time. Early on Barnes warns that “there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them dead, and quite a few of them French,” and quotes Jules Renard’s line that “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish”. That warning is also a kind of method statement: the book lurches from family anecdote to Renard, Montaigne, Flaubert, Koestler, Zola, Stravinsky, and others, not as digressions but as parallel case studies in how human beings have tried to live with the knowledge of extinction. However, there is also something ironic about using anecdotes from fictional authors in that it we are never quite sure what is truth and what is narrative.

With this, we are told a story that could be true, but could also be something that we somehow will to be true. Barnes is repeatedly explicit about this risk of “willing” coherence. In a key late chapter he pushes back against his GP’s idea that dying is the “conclusion” to a life‑narrative. For him, life is “one damn thing after another” rather than a musical score with “theme … development, variation, recapitulation, coda”. He argues that although he respects our desire for narrative, it is often “little more than confabulating.”

So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Alongside narrative and coherence, misremembering is something that comes up again and again, he even quips “misremember me correctly, we should instruct”.

Having recently read Departure(s), a novel that too includes autobiographical threads, I came to this book wondering how it might be different. Clearly, it is different in that it does not purport to be fiction. But then maybe it is not really that different at all as both are forms of artifice and expression. Barnes makes the case that all art (I assume that autobiography and fiction is ‘art’?) is our feeble attempt to say “I was here.”

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers—two or three if lucky—which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Ironically, I am not sure where that leaves me, reading a book and writing a review. I am left wondering.

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Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention. Simon Reynolds ‘Futuromania’

With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

  1. “The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame… The interiorization of the narrative… encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole… The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.” From A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩
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No matter who you are—Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue, or a combination of multiple colors—you will always be in the minority. Most of the people you encounter will be different from you. No matter how well balanced you are, you can’t be all the types at the same time. So you have to adapt to the people you meet. Good communication is often a matter of adapting to others. Thomas Erikson ‘Surrounded by Idiots’

Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types – Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) – to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can reduce conflict, collaborate better, and recognise that “idiots” are usually just people different from you.

This model comes from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, where he mapped four behaviour patterns (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, Compliance) that later became DISC. Subsequent practitioners, such as TTI Success Insights, has since operationalised it into assessment tools and corporate profiling systems. However, Erikson also makes the case for the universality of the patterns with comparisons with Hippocrates’s four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the Aztecs fourfold categorising via the elements fire, air, earth, water, mapping them to leader‑types, easygoing “air” people, community‑minded “earth” people, and quiet, powerful “water” people.

Although I appreciated the way in which this book captures the way that we are all different, I am left wondering if there is a danger of prioritising nature over nurture, as if our own identity and difference is static. Although it is fine to say that I am a ‘Red’, I wonder if this is something that can be worked on? To become a little more ‘Blue’ say? Alternatively, I wonder if we are different colours in different situations, with little evidence to help differentiate between what is the ‘true’ and ‘false’ self. This is something that Erikson touches on:

Consciously or subconsciously, surrounding factors cause me to choose a particular course of action.
And this is how we act. Look at this formula:

BEHAVIOR = f (P × Sf)
Behavior is a function of Personality and Surrounding factors.
Behavior is that which we can observe.
Personality is what we try to figure out.
Surrounding factors are things that we have an influence on.

Conclusion: We continually affect one another in some form or other. The trick is to try to figure out what’s there, under the surface. And this book is all about behavior.

Source: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

With this discussion of difference I am left thinking about Todd Rose’s discussion of the end of average.

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Source: End of Average by Todd Rose

For Rose, people vary across multiple dimensions, aggregating to a single score or type distorts that reality. Used lightly, colour models therefore can serve like a transport map, good enough to navigate some conversations. However, taken too literally, they risk flattening the very individuality Rose is arguing to preserve.

I was left challenged about an organisation expectations and how they balance with people and their colours. If we are to follow Erikson guide, is there actually any point expecting people to create clear documentation or collect the appropriate information relating to an incident if they are not that way inclined? Or should we accept such perceived incompetence? Here I am reminded of Adam Fraser’s discussion of misalignment between behaviour and values. I guess one approach maybe to treat the various labels as a hypothesis about behaviour, not a justification why we can not do something.

If there is any action to come from Erikson’s book it might be to complete some sort of DISC assessment to get a better appreciation of my own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder if this would be useful in conjunction with some sort of coaching program with a focus on growth.

The real issue at hand is that often when people overlook DISC, it’s because they use it to set a firm expectation of understanding people and their behavior rather than using it as a guideline towards growth.

Source: Here’s What’s Wrong With The DISC Personality Assessment by Chad Brown

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Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictional possibility. Julian Barnes ‘Departure(s)’

In a recent newsletter, Laura Hilliger posed the question about why we read memoirs and biographies:

Why do you read memoirs (if you even do)? I read biographies and memoirs partly because I seek to understand the inner lives of people who are known for things.

Source: FBT on Glistening and Gobsmacking by Laura Hilliger

I was left thinking by this and the way in which memoirs and biographies are often written about ‘people who known for things’. Personally, I feel more drawn to memoirs and biographies in the hope of knowing more about myself. Here I am reminded of Michel Faber’s point about art holding up a mirror:

Art does not ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. It holds a mirror up to you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

For example, I am drawn to memoirs like Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop and William McInnes’ Fatherhood which capture the seemingly banal. I am also drawn to those who provide a reminder of an uncanny world, such as Jack Charles’ Jack Charles – Born Again Blakfella or Eddie Betts’ The Boy from Boomerang Crescent. Here I reminded of a quote at the end of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River:

His children’s children would would walk around on the floorboards and never know what was beneath their feet.

Source: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Although I find the various anecdotes of the rich and famous interesting and sometimes entertaining, I am not sure what stories such as David Grohl’s account in The Storyteller of flying back to Los Angeles during an Australian tour to attend a daddy-daughter dance tells me about myself and my world? I was left pondering upon all this while reading Julian Barnes’ novel, Departure(s).

I came upon Departure(s) via the local library’s BorrowBox collection. I had always wanted to read more Barnes, other than A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which I read at university in Ian Topliss and Chris Palmer’s course investigating 20th Century Literature. However, I have never ventured beyond, even if as Barnes jokes about wearing a bag “BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE”. It therefore seems somewhat ironic to start the venture by reading Barnes’ last novel.

As for me, I am now 78, and this will definitely be my last book — my official departure, my final conversation with you. Finishing my last book in my own time and then going silent at least has this useful consequence: it means that you will not be cut off — as Brian Moore feared- in the middle of writing.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

It almost feels like beginning at the end, arrival rather than a departure?

Barnes’s Departure(s) is a hybrid work: part memoir, part essay, part novella-like narrative, all circling memory, aging and what he calls a “life sentence.” He interweaves reflections on a life marked by loss – the deaths of friends, the sudden death of his wife in 2008, and a diagnosis of rare blood cancer during the COVID19 outbreak when the world went into lockdown – with a long story about two pseudonymous friends, “Stephen” and “Jean.”

Their relationship, first at Oxford in the 1960s and then forty years later, becomes the book’s main narrative arc. Through their youthful romance, belated reunion and second separation, Barnes explores how lives become entangled, how others’ stories infiltrate and shape our own, and how memory both founds and distorts identity.

We all know that memory is identity; take away memory and what do we have? Merely some kind of animal existence in the moment.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

The prose moves associatively, like a digressive conversation that breaks its banks, blurring anecdote, criticism and confession. That meandering texture is part of the point: it enacts the way memory actually works – looping, doubling back, getting lost in minutiae – while asking what remains of a life once memory itself begins to fray.

One of the mysteries that I was left wondering about is where the real Julian Barnes stops and the fictional Julian Barnes takes over as he digs through the compost of life.

Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictional possibility.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

In some respects I guess he does not even really know and in some ways that is the point of this text. How do we know what we know is true? Is it because it was recorded in a diary or because our brain remembers it? Is all memoir in fact fiction in sheep’s clothes? I wonder if in the end the question of ‘truth’ is not what necessarily matters in this situation?

[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

Source: The Art of Fiction No. 165 (The Paris Review), Julian Barnes interviewed by Shusha Guppy

In the end, this novel left me seeing the everyday in a different light. Dwight Garner refers to this aspect in Barnes’ writing as ‘bedrock human stuff.’

“Departure(s)” brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired. Barnes’s powers of observation and comment may have diminished, but his appetite for playfulness and detail, for bedrock human stuff, remains unslakable.

Source: Book Review: ‘Departure(s),’ by Julian Barnes – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

While Alex Clark suggests Barnes’ talent is to ‘allow us to feel things.’

One of Barnes’s cleverest and most humane talents has been to allow us to feel things, ordinary things both trifling and important, about our own lives.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair by Alex Clark

Maybe in part this different light is in regards to a life to come? Or the life already here? Maybe because we are all at some stage in life even if our understanding is not always clear.

I remember taking a friend with terminal cancer to a hospital appointment. She sat in a chair while a woman doctor in scrubs knelt tenderly in front of her. My friend said in a puzzled tone, ‘I don’t know what pathway I’m on.’ The doctor looked down at her notes and replied gently, ‘The palliative pathway.’ ‘I thought so,’ my friend said. And so the news was broken. Such language will have to do. Paths are generally nice places to be on, quiet, contemplative, relaxing conduits across fields and woods and upland pastures, even if some of them end at a cliff-edge. But ‘pathway’ is now judged inappropriate by some, as it implies that one path fits all. A suggested replacement phrase is ‘personalised end-of-life care plans for individuals.’ Some of us will prefer ‘pathway’.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

In an interview with Terry Gross, Barnes discusses the importance of thinking about death on a daily:

One of my French gurus is the 17th century philosopher, Montaigne. And he said we should think about death on a daily basis. We should make it our familiar. That’s the best way of treating it. Not as some awful sort of, you know, ghastly skeleton with a scythe and its hand coming to chop us off. That we should think – he said we should think of death when our horse shies or when tile falls off the roof of a house. We should make it sort of – we should almost domesticate it, tame it in this way, and then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages. That’s a wonderfully sort of wise approach to it all. I haven’t got a vegetable garden anymore. I used to have one, and when I planted cabbages, they didn’t do very well. That’s the only fault I can find with Montaigne’s view of death.

Source: Julian Barnes says he’s enjoying himself, but that ‘Departure(s)’ is his last book by Terry Gross

I feel that it is a book that I could easily return to, skip the guide to dying picked up off the pile on the side of the street, Barnes offers a text which provides a space to stop and reflect.

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Genius to me, it’s not like you’re brilliant at everything, it’s when you’ve got some crossed wires within you, that makes you relentlessly move towards something at such a high level that it stands above the rest of the regular playing field. , Baz Luhrmann in Dylan Jones ‘David Bowie - A Life’

I was not exactly sure what to expect with Dylan Jones’ book David Bowie – A Life. I had hoped for a recount of Bowie’s life and career. Although this book provided an insight into the life of David Bowie, it was less a linear depiction than a many-voiced construction of “David Bowie” as artifice and myth. In the same manner as Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics, Dylan Jones uses an oral-history format to create a tapestry of perspectives and points of view, rather than a straightforward document of events. Through the numerous weaves, we are given various insights.

What stood out was that Bowie endlessly borrowed from others. Often once he got what he needed, he would then let people go. He treated collaborators and influences as material.

TONY VISCONTI: David was always tenacious with an idea and he would not let it go. He would switch very rapidly, he would listen to your idea and he would give you very little time to develop it, no more than five minutes, maybe twenty. If it wasn’t working he would say, “Well, try this, I know what it is now,” and then he would not let go of his own idea. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, because even if someone played on his album and they were the bass player or a guitarist, it was still a David Bowie album. If they had any ideas that were overlooked or slighted in any way they should have just kept those ideas and made their own album. There’s a joke in the business, that if you don’t like something you go, “I like what you just played but you can save that for your own album.”

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

The book was full of stories of rich relationships that seemingly fizzled overnight, relationships “held tightly and let go lightly.” This reminded me of Prince and the place and importance of collaboration.

What I discovered was Bowie’s relationship with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I always knew about ‘All the Young Dudes’ which he wrote for Mot the Hoople, but I had somehow overlooked Bowie’s role with albums like Transformer.

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Did Bowie rip off Iggy Pop and Lou Reed? Maybe. He ripped people off, put them on the shelf, and then would maybe come back for them. Maybe not. Lou Reed did feel used. Lou’s biggest ever hit was the Transformer album, and that was Bowie and Ronno. The only two songs that civilians are aware of are “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” Art rock geeks will be able to argue for hours over which of the two live versions of “Waiting for the Man” is definitive. But civilians just know those two songs. Lou wrote them but it was David and Mick who crafted the arrangements and made them popular.

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

I guess this is what is touched on in the film Velvet Goldmine?

Growing up, David Bowie’s music was seemingly accepted, played on repeat on Gold 104.3, something captured in Damian Cowell’s discussion of ’only the shit you love‘. However, this is far from the reality. The music was far from straight up conservative pop, but rather risqué and littered with sexual liberation and drugs.

With this in mind, I really did not know what to make of his marriage to Angie and his early life. All I could think about was what it must have been like being Zowie? Did he go to school? Going from one place to another, did he have friends? A Childhood? Here I was reminded of Claudia Karvan being brought up in Kings Cross nightclubs. As an oral history, these aspects are often touched on, but never properly unpacked.

In the end, one of the things that I was left thinking about after reading this book was how do you actually capture someone whose life was so fictional and contradictory?

Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?

Source: Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

Having watched both Moonage Daydream and Bowie: The Final Act I was taken by the way in which each documentary prioritised different facets to Bowie’s life. With this in mind, I think that Dylan Jones’ approach of leaning into the various contradictions provides the best means of making sense of Bowie.

ERIN KEANE: What is any true legacy but complicated?

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

Throughout, Jones and his interviewees keep circling the split between David Jones and “Bowie.” One admirer remarked that Iman “was married to David Jones, not David Bowie… David Robert Jones was honest, genuine, and real.” Interestingly, my biggest takeaway was that there is a difference between David Bowie, the artist, and David Jones, the man. Although we are given a glimpse of David Jones, it feels like there is always something just beyond.

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I have the right to belong in this soul-country? Do Aboriginals belong in some deeper way than the rest of us, even though none as yet lays a Native Title claim to it? Would such a pre-emptive claim of belonging—if that is what a Native Title claim is—reduce or disqualify my own sense? If so, must it always? Considering those questions, and how non-Aboriginal Australians are grappling with them, is the subject of this book. Peter Read ‘Belonging’

In Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Peter Read explores the complex, often fraught quest for non-Aboriginal belonging in Australia. Rather than offering a rigid definition, he examines this concept through a series of lenses, always keeping Aboriginal prior occupation and spiritual connection at the center of the frame.

Read’s journey begins with his personal reflection on the discomfort of loving a landscape that is also “deep Aboriginal country.” He pointedly asks whether non-Aboriginal attachment can ever be innocent when the land in question was forcibly taken. This ethical inquiry expands as Read turns to poetry, using it as a medium to hear how Australians both claim and question their right to the land.

The narrative then shifts to the next generation, where Read interviews students and young adults. He maps a spectrum of perspectives—from those who feel a “disentanglement” of personal guilt from historical dispossession, to those who identify as “world citizens,” effectively bypassing the complexities of national belonging. Read further complicates this by looking at migrant experiences, noting that for many, belonging is rooted in people, memory, and contribution rather than a sacralized connection to the soil. This leads to a difficult dialogue on reconciliation and the danger of privileging one group’s “authenticity” over another.

Read’s investigation extends to those whose lives are physically and socially entangled with Aboriginal communities, such as pastoral workers and activists. He then tests these themes against popular culture, analyzing how Australian country music and Aboriginal performance either resist or re-imagine contested belonging. He listens for who is granted the title of “native-born” and how music navigates the ghosts of invasion and land rights.

The book concludes with a series of dialogues with prominent historians including Heather Goodall, Henry Reynolds, and Lyndall Ryan. Together, they grapple with how the “hard truths” of history—massacres and the Stolen Generations pull against any easy sense of home. For some, this historical reckoning leads to a “hard-won” sense of being not unwelcome, while for others, it results in a permanent sense of being an outsider.

Ultimately, Read argues that belonging is both personal and plural. It is not a destination, but a process that grows through listening, sharing responsibility, and seeking “equal partnership” rather than sameness. Reading this book nearly three decades after it was prescribed reading as a part of my Arts degree, the book feels just as uncannily current today in the wake of the Voice referendum and Australia’s ever evolving culture.

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The band is family. Family is the band. James Campion - Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era

Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era by James Campion argues that the usual “solitary genius” story about Prince only explains half of his greatest decade. Campion reframes the Purple Rain era as the story of a community: Prince & the Revolution and the orbit of side projects that became his laboratory.

Drawing heavily on interviews with band members and close collaborators, the book shows how a supposedly self-contained auteur depended on — and was transformed by — a multi-racial, intergender ensemble with its own personalities, tensions, and agency. Beginning with early allies like André Cymone and Bobby Z and evolving into the classic Revolution lineup (Wendy, Lisa, BrownMark, Dr. Fink, Bobby Z), Prince discovered that his most radical, popular work emerges from what Campion calls “the delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration” rather than from isolation.

Although Prince would lead varied musical groups throughout his professional life (New Power Generation, 3RDEYEGIRL), where he further explored his art with similar fervor if not as celebrated critical or popular acclaim, the band we’re focusing on in this volume is the Revolution. Specifically, but not limited to guitarists Dez Dickerson and Wendy Melvoin, pianist Lisa Coleman, bassists André Cymone and BrownMark, drummer Bobby Z, and keyboardists Gayle Chapman and Matt “Doctor” Fink. It is in this delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration that Prince realized his most compelling, radical, and popular art during his most prolific period. The Revolution was the creative apparatus in which he shattered racial and gender barriers within and beyond the music business, providing a progressive milieu for him to become one of the most important American musical figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Source: Revolution – Campion

Campion emphasizes that “the band became Prince’s voice,” capturing both his communication difficulties offstage and the emotional intensity he could only fully express in music. The book dwells on the “all‑in” expectation he imposed: no drugs or alcohol, perpetual readiness, brutal rehearsal schedules (never “practice”), and total immersion in a shared on‑ and offstage persona. The band is repeatedly described as surrogate family, a chosen tribe that helped him dismantle racial and gender boundaries while also shielding his shyness and volatility.

For Prince, the band meant being all-in—members always dressed in their stage guises, proudly flaunting their uniqueness and solidarity. There would be no alcohol or drugs. They were expected to show up on time every time and play to his specifications and expectations. This meant committing to intense rehearsals that were to never be referenced as “practice”—he preached that amateurs practice to become musicians, professionals “rehearse.” And rehearsals were where the magic began for Prince. The stage was his sacred space, in front of audiences or otherwise. It was the altar of his art—ritual bonding, telepathic connection, and creative alchemy. It was where total dedication to the craft meant proving unconditional love: The band is family. Family is the band.

Source: Revolution – Campion

Around that core, the book treats Prince’s satellite projects — The Time, Vanity 6/Apollonia 6, The Family, Madhouse, Sheila E., the Bangles, Mazarati and more — as extensions of his imagination rather than mere side hustles. These collaborations let him try on different voices (feminine, villainous, comic, ultra‑funk) and often created feedback loops: songs and ideas could be conceived for others, then reclaimed, reshaped, or recontextualized in his own work, underscoring how fluidly material moved through his ecosystem. At the same time, Campion underlines the limits of that system: there were only so many hours and only so much of Prince’s attention to go around, so something always had to give. The Time, for instance, both “enhanced and challenged Prince’s creative autonomy” and eventually grew resentful about feeling underpaid, sidelined, and used to back other acts like Vanity 6 behind a curtain, even as Prince admitted they were “the only band I’ve ever been afraid of.” Another casualty of his divided focus was Mazarati, whose self‑titled debut on Paisley Park Records received scant support and “floundered without much support from the nascent label,” briefly charting before disappearing.

Stylistically, Campion can be melodramatic and occasionally overcooked — especially in the song-by-song breakdowns — but that heightened tone suits a subject who lived in extremes. Like Rob Sheffield’s writing (fittingly, he writes the preface), the narrative walks a line between fandom and critical distance. Revolution is reverent about the music, but honest about Prince’s paranoia, emotional distance, power plays, and the eventual strain that success and control issues placed on the band.

A recurring theme throughout is the interplay between skill and vibe. Campion details how technically formidable players (Wendy & Lisa’s harmonic imagination, Dr. Fink’s synth wizardry, Sheila E’s virtuosity, the horn section’s jazz chops) constantly interacted with looser, feel-based energy — extended jams, onstage improvisations, and in-studio experiments that blurred jazz, funk, rock, pop, and electronic textures. What ultimately seems to matter most is commitment, an “all in atmosphere”, where everyone agrees to live at Prince’s pace and intensity, whether in marathon warehouse rehearsals or spontaneous live reworkings of catalog songs.

The book also opens a window on what it meant to work for someone with “a million personalities.” Campion tracks Prince’s different modes — tender, playful, ferociously exacting, aloof, petty, visionary — and shows how band members adapted, sometimes by naming those personas and privately decoding which “Prince” had walked into rehearsal that day. Lisa and Wendy’s stories, in particular, reveal a creative intimacy that could flip quickly into distance or punishment, raising the question of which version of him any given collaborator encountered.

Discussing her gradual understanding of the many moods of Prince Rogers Nelson the Revolution navigated daily in 2021, Wendy recalled code names they’d apply to their illustrious leader to prepare for what was to come. There was Steve, “the cool guy you could hang out with, and he wore gym socks and played basketball,” and Marilyn, a needy persona that would “talk softly, and it was like walking on eggshells.” When revealing his playful demeanor, there was George Jefferson—named after the caustic braggadocio from the seventies hit TV series, The Jeffersons, whose peacock-like prancing Prince imitated to a “t.” Oft-times the first words Prince spoke when arriving at rehearsal could put everyone on alert. If it was conversational like “Let’s run down the show from the top,” then events would proceed smoothly. But if a solemn Prince barked, “Big up!” they were in for a long afternoon into evening. But no matter the disposition, Wendy quickly noticed that Prince was always dialed in creatively and developed her own radar to adjust that dial through her personality and her playing.

Source: Revolution – Campion

This reflection had me wondering which personality Sinéad O’Connor met years ago.

In the final stretch, Campion examines the expansion into the “New Revolution,” the dilution of the tight family feel, and the slow, painful unraveling of the original core lineup. He links Prince’s deepening exhaustion with fame, the trauma of Purple Rain’s success, and his restless desire for new sonic directions to the decision to dissolve the band and return to a more solitary, studio-locked working method. The official breakup, framed by a Joni Mitchell quote about growth and experimentation over formula and hits, underlines the central tension of the entire book: Prince’s need for community versus his compulsion to shed it whenever he sensed it was limiting his evolution.

On October 17, 1986, Prince’s publicist issued a press release announcing the dissolution of the Revolution. Inside was a telling quote from Joni Mitchell, whose restless spirit he had absorbed: “He’s driven like an artist. His motivations are growth and experimentation as opposed to formula and hits.”

Source: Revolution – Campion

In the end, Revolution does not necessarily till new ground, but rather reorders familiar stories around the people who stood next to him onstage and in the studio. It suggests that the Prince most listeners mythologise — the one who made Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, and the surrounding projects — is inseparable from The Revolution and its wider universe. The book’s main contribution is to make that collective visible and to show how, for a crucial period, the band was not just playing his music, it was crucial to how he thought, felt, and changed.

I think that Steven Hyden sums it up best in his praise for the book:

Prince is commonly understood to be a solitary genius who created some of the greatest songs of the 80s and 90s largely by himself. But the reality is that he worked with scores of collaborators, the most famous being his backing band, the Revolution. James Campion finally gives the Revolution the attention they deserve, adding some necessary insight into the legend we all know and love.

Source: Praise for Revolution