Nick Soulsby

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About Nick Soulsby

http://www.nirvana-legacy.com

Back in January 2012 I saw a contest in a magazine; a publisher open to record-related book proposals. The little angel on one shoulder said "you could do that," while the demon on the other said "yeah, right, go on then..." I thought it was time to tell the demon where to go - so I gave it a shot...And I wasn't selected - "you're up against people who have been writing about music for decades," polite and true. But I already had so much material flooding out I kept going: a friend's little press put out my first book - 'Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide', an evaluation of Nirvana's 1992 Incesticide compilation.

This led onto writing a quite extensive blog about Nirvana: nirvana-legacy.com. I wound up curious about all the little unknown bands Nirvana played with 1987-1994 and began tracking them down. I interviewed 210 musicians from 170 bands to create "I Found My Friends: the Oral History of Nirvana" (St Martin's Press, 2015). I then worked with Soul Jazz Records on the double album "No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds of the North West Grunge Era" (Soul Jazz, 2014), a compilation of rare music from that era. I was then asked to contribute to a series called 'musicians in their own words' for which I sourced rare, significant, revealing interviews with Kurt Cobain. "Cobain on Cobain: Interviews & Encounters" (Chicago Review Press, 2016) represented the end of my focus on Nirvana after four years, three books and over a million words on the blog - what more could I say?

I moved on. My next work celebrated an artist whose enduring creativity and ability to expand his reach and range, without pastiche or dilution inspire me: Thurston Moore. "We Sing A New Language: the Oral Discography of Thurston Moore" (Omnibus Press, 2017) provided a narrative built around the thoughts and memories of over 150 musicians who worked with Moore on over 200 of his releases outside of Sonic Youth.

My latest volume is "Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence - the Oral History" (Jawbone Press, 2018). Why Swans? Again, I think it's the life philosophy that awes me: how does one stay creative across an entire lifetime without repeating oneself, ceasing to strive for the amazing, always creating art rather than just 'product'? My feeling is that Michael Gira, Jarboe and a number of the 30+ individuals to be official members of Swans 1981-1997/2010-2018 have found answers...

My desire, ultimately, is to never write about anything that is not a mark of respect to something I consider exceptional, that I do not find profoundly meaningful. I have a normal day job and there's next to no money in writing - and a few extra pennies would never make me devote the long night-time hours and weekends to making these works happen if I could not find something beautiful within them. That's my dearest hope: to always put blood and life onto the page.

Danny Goldberg

Richard Bienstock

Michael Azerrad

Charles R. Cross

Dave Grohl

Gillian G. Gaar

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Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over: A Companion To The Film By Beth B 28/04/2020

by Nick Soulsby

( 28 )

$11.99

I’m never against the individual, I’m against systems that oppress individuals. I’m defending the shy boys against the bullies. I deal with very negative things in an aggressive way because I’m using the language of the enemy, but at the end of my dark tunnel is light forever. Lydia Lunch

All of the themes that I’ve been unravelling these forty years: abuse, the cycle of violence in our culture, sexuality, giving voice to the unheard, knocking down the patriarchy, dominance, submission, trauma, recovery … it’s all here. Beth B

Lydia’s greatest work of art is herself. She had this aggressiveness and power, like no other women or artists around at the time, and here we are all these years later and she’s exactly the same. Bob Bert

Before #MeToo, before Riot Grrl, there was Lydia Lunch. A central figure in the no-wave scene of the 70s—as founder of the seminal Teenage Jesus & The Jerks—Lunch has spent the decades since turning the substance of her life into unapologetic, stark, and beautiful art.

From the eighties onward, Lunch became a lone voice publicly calling out the patriarchal aggression and day-to-day violence enacted by the powerful—and never gave a good goddamn whether you wanted to hear it or not. Refusing to be silenced, she took to stages the world over, fearlessly speaking the truth, whether of her own life with its legacy of parental abuse, her wild times owning the streets of New York City, or the world she saw around her.

Seeing no boundaries between creative mediums, Lydia has enacted her vision through music, spoken word, film, theatre, and more. Released as an accompaniment to Beth B’s new documentary Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, this book is the first comprehensive overview of Lunch’s creative campaign of resistance, a celebration of pleasure as the ultimate act of rebellion.

Across these pages, Lunch and her numerous collaborators—including Thurston Moore, Jim Sclavunos, Kid Congo Powers, Bob Bert, and Richard Kern—recount life at the front line of the musical extremes of the seventies and eighties underground, the wild times, the disciplined productivity, life lived as a defender of the voiceless, and an unapologetic force of righteous fury.

Other Formats:: Paperback

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Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence: The Oral History 26/06/2018

by Nick Soulsby

( 121 )

$11.99

‘I’m no stranger to failure, and I’m aware it can arrive at any minute—as it often has. You have to keep things close to your chest and be aware of what’s really important: the work, not everything around it. If you have faith in the work, then the people will come … it’s an artistic imperative, it has nothing to do with public perception or career or any of that crap.’
‘The name, Swans, it’s synonymous with who I am, but it’s how it’s achieved and it’s achieved by people—those people need to have total commitment to making this sound and to making it utterly incisive and uncompromising. The work is everything and it has to—at least at the time—appear, to me, to be stellar. That’s the prerequisite. It’s an intangible thing where it really speaks and has some truth within it.’
—Michael Gira

Over a span of some three and a half decades, Michael Gira’s Swans have risen from chaotic origins in the aftermath of New York’s No Wave scene to become one of the most acclaimed rock-orientated acts of recent years. The 1980s’ infamous ‘loudest band on the planet’ morphed repeatedly until collapsing exhausted, broken, and dispirited in the late 1990s.

Swans returned triumphantly in 2010 to top end-of-year polls and achieve feted status among fans and critics alike as the great survivors and latter-day statesmen of the underground scene. Throughout, Gira’s desire has remained to create music of such intensity that the listener might forget flesh, get rid of the body, exist as pure energy—transcendent—inside of the sound.

Through these pages, the musicians responsible tell the tale of one of the most significant bands of the US post-punk era. Drawing on more than 125 original interviews, Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence is the ultimate companion to Swans and their work from the 1980s to the present day.

Nick Soulsby is the author of Thurston Moore: We Sing A New Language (2017), Cobain On Cobain: Interviews & Encounters (2016), I Found My Friends: The Oral History Of Nirvana (2015) and Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana In The Shards Of Incesticide (2012). In 2014 he curated the compilation No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds Of The North West Grunge Era 1986–1997 with Soul Jazz Records, and he also wrote the oral history of the band Fire Ants for the reissue of their 1993 EP Stripped.

Other Formats:: Paperback

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Cobain on Cobain: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words Book 9) 01/02/2016

by Nick Soulsby

( 23 )

$15.42

Cobain on Cobain places the reader at the key moments of Kurt Cobain's roller-coaster career, telling the tale of Nirvana entirely through his words and those of his bandmates. Each interview is another knot in a thread running from just after the recording of their first album, Bleach, to the band's collapse on the European tour of 1994 and Cobain's subsequent suicide. Interviews have been chosen to provide definitive coverage of the events of those five years from as close as possible, so that the reader can see Cobain reacting to the circumstances of each tour, each new release, each public incident, all the way down to the end. Including many interviews that have never before seen print, Cobain on Cobain will long remain the definitive source for anyone searching for Kurt Cobain's version of his own story.

Other Formats:: Hardcover , Paperback

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I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Nirvana 31/03/2015

by Nick Soulsby

( 24 )

$12.93

I Found My Friends recreates the short and tempestuous times of Nirvana through the musicians and producers who played and interacted with the band. The guides for this trip didn't just watch the life of this legendary band—they lived it. Soulsby interviewed over 150 musicians from bands that played and toured with Nirvana, including well-known alternative and grunge bands like Dinosaur Jr., The Dead Kennedys, and Butthole Surfers, as well as scores of smaller, but no less fascinating bands.

In this groundbreaking look at a legendary band, readers will see a more personal history of Nirvana than ever before, including Nirvana's consideration of nearly a dozen previously unmentioned candidates for drummer before settling on David Grohl, a recounting of Nirvana's famously disastrous South American shows from never-before-heard sources on Brazilian and Argentine sides, and the man who hosted the first ever Nirvana gig's recollections of jamming with the band at that inaugural event.

I Found My Friends relives Nirvana's meteoric rise from the days before the legend to through their increasingly damaged superstardom. More than twenty years after Kurt Cobain's tragic death, Nick Soulsby removes the posthumous halo from the brow of Kurt Cobain and travels back through time to observe one of rock and roll‘s most critical bands as no one has ever seen them before.

Other Formats:: Paperback

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Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil 18/10/2022

by Nick Soulsby

$30.23

Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.

Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.

Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.

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Thurston Moore We sing a new language (Camion Blanc) (French Edition) 19/01/2019

by Nick Soulsby, Angélique Merklen, Maxim Dubreuil

( 9 )

$28.10

We Sing A New Language est le premier compte-rendu minutieux du travail de Thurston Moore qui compte des centaines d'enregistrements, que ce soit en solo ou via des collaborations, par la voix de ses divers collègues relatant ses réussites dans une grande variété de démarches pleine d'inventivité, le fil conducteur restant le dévouement passionné de Moore à la musique. De la célébration de Fluxus au noise et à l'improvisation en passant par la guitare acoustique et le black metal, sa carrière défie tout résumé mais méritait amplement cette exploration soigneuse. S'étendant de 1978 - avec Sonic Youth, présent bien avant le « rock alternatif » et toujours prêt à expérimenter - à aujourd'hui, l'ouvrage de Nick Soulsby emmène le lecteur à l'intérieur de ce processus créatif, se saisissant de chaque changement clé, de chaque nouveau développement dans l'oeuvre de Moore, depuis l'époque où il fonctionnait dans l'orchestre de guitares de Glenn Branca jusqu'à son adoption sans réserve du free jazz et de l'impro au milieu des années 90. Ces pages sont remplies d'anecdotes issues de la scène rock new-yorkaise, au fil de l'évolution de l'industrie du disque, depuis le commerce de cassettes et de radiocassettes jusqu'aux actuels Spotify et autre PayPal. Anti-rock-star devenu de son vivant monument de la musique, c'est par sa curiosité insatiable que Thurston Moore, toujours heureux d'expérimenter, ne craignant pas de s'immerger dans de nombreux domaines musicaux et auprès d'un grand nombre d'artistes de toute discipline, a su rester un éternel adolescent. We Sing A New Language n'est pas une biographie de Thurston Moore mais un recueil d'anecdote par les musiciens et les artistes qui l'ont côtoyé. Les fans et les musiciens enthousiastes se régaleront de ces récits.

Other Formats:: Kindle , Paperback

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Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide 09/12/2012

by Nicholas Soulsby, Maureen Johnson, Ben Sumner, NAS

( 2 )

$9.90

In 1992, fresh from the colossal success of Nevermind, Nirvana
released Incesticide. To some this odd little album was just a
loose collection of B-sides and outtakes cobbled together to cash
in on the band's newfound fame. But to many others it offered
a truer reflection of Nirvana — a glimpse into the dark soul of a
band reclaiming its punk roots.

This isn’t another biography of Kurt Cobain or a story book about
how a band from Seattle changed music in the 1990s. Instead,
through the dark slivers of Incesticide, Nirvana’s most neglected
release, this work penetrates the surface drama of the band's
career to dissect the tightly bound ideas that unite their songs.

On the twentieth anniversary of Incesticide's release, this
extraordinary book reveals the hidden structures and meanings
threaded through some of the most important rock music ever made.

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