Hello,

We’re excited to reveal our favourite books of the year. Perhaps you’re already familiar with our picks if you’ve got a copy of our end of year zine. Designed by our lovely friend Musho Fernandez at Good Press just down the road, every online order comes with a copy (and a mix CD feat. tracks from our albums of the year). You can pick them both up in the shop too.

In alphabetical order, these are the new books that we’ve agreed should represent us this year. We’ve got plenty of signed / exclusive editions, so do have a scroll.

Happy reading and thank you as always.

Love, monorail.

MONORAIL’S BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Sometimes it feels like Alasdair Roberts has been with us forever – one of the wisest, quietest voices in a music world he’s beautifully enhanced with his mesmerising songwriting and gentle knowledge. He wears it lightly, occupying a unique place between traditional and modern ideas, sort of folk music, sort of not – always trying to howk out the language in things. Library of Aethers is a selection of Roberts’ song lyrics from juvenilia to early senilia, featuring 70-plus song texts plus some translations (into Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Scots!). Artwork / design by Glasgow’s legendary Annabel Wright.

A Record Could Be Your Whole World – and don’t we know it. Here’s a beautiful artefact from elsewhere / NZ which declares Vinyl Records As The Total Artwork Of The Late Twentieth Century. Edited by Bruce Russell and Luke Wood, riso-printed with full colour inserts, there’s love all over this – Russell on The Fall’s early landmark, Slates; Wood on The Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. There’s crucial info on Letraset, lathe-cutting, mixtapes, micro and macro music, records as portals. It’s got an essay by Jon Dale called Music Has Broad Shoulders which is the perfect summary of what this book is. Similar feeling to dipping into The Wire 20 odd years ago – there’s so much out there, so much to convey, so let’s get stuck in.

Chris Brickley’s Heartlands brings the original goth scene in Scotland back into focus. Through rare, unpublished photography and ephemera, as well as thoughtful texts from a range of contributors, Heartlands rekindles some of the magic for scenesters who were there, or those who missed out. Goths, positive/post punks, call them what you will, this most enduring of subcultures is re-presented for a contemporary audience, 40 years down the line. See the bands too, key and local, Ausgang to Xmal, Sisters to Nico, at clubs like Night Moves, Strutz and the Hooch. With a tender foreword from Chris Connelly (Fini Tribe, Revolting Cocks, Ministry), this book is the next-best thing to a time-machine. We have signed paperback copies.

Johnnie Johnstone offers a peek right Through The Crack In The Wall and straight into the secret history of Edinburgh’s greatest post punk group Josef K. This is a big one: the first ever biography of the band, tracing their story from their origins in leafy Scottish suburbs through to their untimely implosion four years later. Essential then, essential now. We loved this one.

The essential, incredible archive of a seminal group. Huggy Bear was a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-1994. Outcast and outraged, they made a howling, squalling mess of punk, all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Killed (of Kids) is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear. It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers and ephemera from their three year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, encouragement.

The Secret Public is an electrifying look at key moments in music and entertainment history between 1955 and 1979. From the secret sexuality of stars such as Little Richard in the 1950s through to the ambiguity of David Bowie, glam rock and Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. Jon reflects on the figures and events that helped move gay culture from the margins to the mainstream and changed the face of pop forever. The Secret Public is a searching examination of the fortitude and resilience of the gay community through the lens of popular music and culture; it reflects on the freedom found in divergence from the norm and reminds us of the need to be vigilant against those seeking to roll back the rights of marginalised groups.

Every few years I have the same epiphany and remember how important Buzzcocks music was to me, especially in my teenage years – not only their music but the pathways they suggested. When Pete Shelley died I was visiting my mum, in my old bedroom, and it hit me hard – this person I didn’t know but looked up to, who had changed my life. How can that be? In his brilliant book, Sixteen Again, ex-Fall drummer, Paul Hanley, grapples with something similar – the relationship between a young fan and his favourite group. But it’s a bigger picture that Hanley paints – he gets inside the group and explains their importance not only in their time but as a legacy – what they meant to the groups that followed them, to the independent music scene and to Manchester music and the city in general. Hanley’s argument is that Pete Shelley was the pivotal person in all of this – the connector, the low-key genius, the accidental hero. SP

The life-affirming debut novel by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. It’s the early 90s in Glasgow and “Stephen” (music loving romantic) has emerged from a lengthy hospital stay diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little understood disease that has robbed him of any prospects of work, a social life or independent living. Meeting fellow strugglers, who the world seems to care less and less for, they form their own support group and try to get by as cheaply and as painlessly as possible. Leaving Glasgow in search of a cure in the mythic warmth of California, Stephen and his friend Richard float between hostels, sofas, and park benches. A really beautiful debut.

Lawrence is the greatest pop star you have never heard of (but if you shop with us then I think it’s fair to say you probably have?). If not…in 1979, Lawrence formed Felt, who released ten albums and ten singles in ten years before splitting up. In Street-Level Superstar, bestselling author/journalist Will Hodgkinson follows Lawrence for a whole year amidst cafes and rainy streets and…Holland and Barretts…as he rebuilds his life. “Will has finally written his masterpiece,” says Lawrence, “glad I could be of service.”

For 5 years after they’d swapped sought-after apprenticeships for life on the dole, brothers William and Jim Reid sat up till the early hours in the front room of their parents’ East Kilbride council house, plotting their path to world domination over endless cups of tea, with the music turned down low so as not to wake their sleeping sister. They knew they couldn’t play in the same band because they’d argue too much, so they’d describe their dream ensembles to each other until finally they realised that these two perfect bands were actually the same band, and the name of that band was The Jesus and Mary Chain. The rest was not silence, and picking up those conversations again more than 40 years later, William and Jim tell the full story of one of Britain’s greatest guitar bands for the very first time – a wildly funny and improbably moving chronicle of brotherly strife, feedback, riots, drug and alcohol addiction, eternal outsiders and extreme shyness, that also somehow manages to be a love letter to the Scottish working-class family. Instant classic.