Uncommon People - Miranda Sawyer

Miranda Sawyer is a great journalist and this is a great book. It’s not just that her writing is sharp, clever and perceptive with a neat turn of phrase. She brings up ideas so obvious you chide yourself for failing to spot the fact that they were not acknowledged until she shines a spotlight on them. This whole book is a clever idea, that captures a movement / moment in time in 20 bands ,and within that, 20 songs. Miranda Sawyer benefits from the unique access she has always been given by bands, not least because she is a music journalist who really knows her stuff, but as much that you sense she would always be good fun to be around. Not taking things too seriously . Happy to indulge in everything else that was going on. But always on her own terms. Miranda Swawyer is too cool and canny to be pigeon-holed into the simple “ladette” box. She actually, like many of the outstanding women lead singers she interviews for this book, is well beyond that sort of categorisation. She understands the music industry, very much for what it is and bands and the people within them for what they are - often fascinating and unique and sometimes strange and flawed. The book itself is a simple review of 20 different bands, how they came about, how they went about it, and what happened next. Some of these are exhilarating stories and some are much more mundane. Even if you are not a fan of some of the bands she talks about you’ll find yourself checking them out once more on Spotify - to see what it is you missed. Still can’t make my mind up about Stereolab, but trying hard and Peng is a great album - how did I miss that. Anyway it’s 20 bands, but so much more than the sum of its parts and, as well as their individual contributions to Britpop and Beyond, as she describes it, the book highlights a moment in time that is so much more than Liam and Patsy under a Union Jack. Recommended.