Hell Is Round The Corner
Tricky
With
Having read it
★★★★☆
A good book that started well by exploring and describing his early years in Bristol, as a Knowle-Wester, but slowed a bit in its last-third.
Overall it was insightful and really helped by comments from his friends, family and music colleagues; they helped explore and explain context for many events Adrian Thaws describes himself.
In his own way though he’s never been one to dwell too much on past events, or his own deliberately challenging musical endeavours, so he keeps moving forward, never wanting to be defined by past happenings but using them to propel him forward and his memoir kind of does that. He’s a complex individual who’s achieved a lot and will likely continue to do so. Good stuff.
A good passage
One time I was in the Robins pub, and Wayney had just shot some guy in the neck. I was sat at the bar, and my cousin was playing pool or something, and Wayne came in. I’ve known him all my life, and he goes, ‘Do you want a drink?’ So I goes, ‘Yeah, alright, Wayne,’ then he made the guy next me but me the drink. He goes, ‘Aw, leave it out, Wayne!’ and he put his fingers in the guy’s neck like they were a pistol.
He was a bit crazy, Wayne. He went missing in 1988. Someone had killed him, and they eventually found his body five years later, chopped up into pieces and embedded in a concrete floor in a terraced house in Southville.
A handful of my uncles and cousins could have met a similar fate. In fact, one of them did, and when I really stop to think about it, so could I.
A second good passage
While I was recording, Britpop was going on, and I just couldn’t see any of that being new. Everything I was seeing around me – there were new bands, but there was no new music. That’s why I wrote ‘Brand New, You’re Retro’, about all these bands coming along, like, ‘This is the new shit.’ My answer was, ‘No, you sound like The Beatles, you sound like the Rolling Stones, you’ve even got the same haircut, you wear sunglasses in a nightclub – there’s nothing new about you at all! You’re just a retro band that’s having some success.’
There were people doing soul music in the charts, straight up – like, why the fuck are you doing soul music? How are you new? It’s like secondhand emotions, acting all traumatised on TV. It was like, ‘You ain’t Billie Holiday!’ I just thought I’d heard it all before, and I wanted to be different, and turn it all upside down.
A third good passage
Nowadays, by contrast, going to a pub is good enough for me. I want less from life now. If you wanna have a beer with your mates, Bristol is a great city to do it. There’s nothing that appeals to me more than drinking in a totally crappy pub – not a happening pub with a DJ, just a shitty little bar – and wheeling out stories from our neighbourhood from years ago, and who is doing what, and, ‘Did you hear about so-and-so? Did you hear about that shop that got robbed?’ I’ve found that I can go back there and relate to people again.