Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor: Music, Manchester, and More: A Memoir

Dave Haslam

Softcover | 12.7 x 2.22 x 19.69 cm | 352 pp

Constable | 2019 | 9781472127518

Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor is writer and DJ Dave Haslam's wonderfully evocative memoir. It is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and birth of the rave era, and how music has sound-tracked a life and a generation.

In the late 1970s Dave Haslam was a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan, his face pressed against a 'window', looking in at a world of music, books and ideas. Four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester. Into the story of those intervening decades, Haslam weaves a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city and the impact of a number of life-changing events, such as the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack.

The cast of Haslam's life reads like a who's who of '70s, '80s and '90s popular culture: Tony Wilson, Nile Rodgers, Terry Hall, Neneh Cherry, Tracey Thorn, John Lydon, Johnny Marr, Ian Brown, Laurent Garnier and David Byrne. From having Morrissey to tea and meeting writers such as Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen to discussing masturbation with Viv Albertine and ecstasy with Roisin Murphy, via having a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda and a drug dealer threatening to slit his throat, this is not your usual memoir.

'Beautifully judged account of the Manchester scene . . . There is something of the fairy tale about Dave Haslam's sage joyful testament to the kind of life that nobody could ever plan, a happy aligning of a cultural moment and a young man who instinctively knew that it was his once upon a time' Victoria Segal, Sunday Times

'Witty, sometimes dark, revealing, insightful, everything one could hope for from one of those folk without whom independent music simply wouldn't exist' Classic Rock

Exhilarating . . . For fans of club culture, pop music, youthful exuberance and grown-up wisdom Q magazine

Resonant and thoughtful . . . Manchester - and British nightlife in general - is lucky to have Haslam as its archivist The Quietus

Vibrant Irish Independent

The easy-read essential of the summer DJ magazine

Wonderful Maria Balshaw, Observer

Book of the year Gilles Peterson

Terrific stuff . . . looking back, looking forward and looking at the here and now Ian Rankin

PLEASE NOTE: this title has been remainder marked by the publisher - a marker pen dot on one edge - see final image.