Rock Stars Stole My Life by Mark Ellen review – misty-eyed, touchingly nerdy memoir

From the mud and thunder of early festivals to Live Aid and Rihanna, music journalist Mark Ellen was usually in the right place at the right timeMark Ellen surveys the happy youngsters comfortably cavorting at Glastonbury, marvelling at Primal Scream beneath a harvest moon. “You bastards,” moans the music journalist and editor, recalling his nascent festival experiences in the early 1970s, of trench foot, scurvy and Van der Graaf Generator. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”Still, there’s a misty-eyed reverence for the past in Ellen’s entertaining memoir of five decades surrounded by music – which is to be expected. This, after all, is the man who launched Mojo magazine after realising there was a potential readership who liked music that was “magical and built to last”. For Ellen, the magic began with the discovery of the Beatles and the Kinks, Small Faces and Chicken Shack. Like a character from Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club, his comfortable 60s and 70s adolescence discussing the meaning of prog is ditched for a squat in Battersea, where he begins to pen florid gig reviews for Record Mirror and NME.  Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2015-03-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-05-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Black Classic Press Marks 40 Years

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2018-05-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Review: Vintage Roger Hall play runs well with 'soup up'; Some features outdated

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[ Stuff | 2018-05-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Vermont Life Is Shutting Down After 72 Years

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[ Folio Magazine | 2018-05-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Kings Road signs memoir of Britain’s first black chief constable Michael Fuller

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[ The Bookseller | 2018-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Maya Angelou's memoirs to be dramatised for Radio 4

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[ The Bookseller | 2018-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Scandal-rocked Nobel board won't award literature prize this year

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[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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We need to know if there is life on Mars before we send humans there

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[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Wellcome Book Prize Goes to Mark O’Connell for ‘To Be a Machine’

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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The artist, evolving and then fully formed in Nat Geo's ‘Genius: Picasso,’ starring Antonio Banderas

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[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-04-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Patterson's next series marks 'most important work he's ever done'

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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Publishing Perspectives | 2018-04-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2018-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Brace Yourself, James Comey Wrote a Memoir. Here’s Some of What It Says, “the Golden Showers Thing” Included.

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[ Slate | 2018-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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DC Marks 80 Years of ‘Action Comics’ and Superman with Hardcover Tribute

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2018-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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