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

Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor is writer/DJ Dave Haslam's gloriously well-crafted memoir, documenting his encounters with inspiring characters including Tony Wilson, Nile Rodgers, Terry Hall, Neneh Cherry, Tracey Thorn, John Lydon, John Peel, Ian Brown, Laurent Garnier and David Byrne. He interviews Johnny Marr and John Lydon; Sonic Youth sleep on his floor; he meets writers including Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen; he discusses masturbation with Viv Albertine, and ecstasy with Roisin Murphy; he has a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda, a drug dealer threatens to slit his throat; and Morrissey comes to tea. In the late 1970s, a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan, Haslam's face was pressed against a window, looking out at a world of music, books, ideas. In 2017, four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester. Haslam builds a rich context to the story of those decades; a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city; the impact of life-shaking events (from the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack); and how music has soundtracked his life, his times, his generation. Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and the birth of the rave era, and so much more . . .