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“If you thought The Dirt hilarious, this spectacularly gonzo collection of loosely linked short stories suggests a much darker beat at the heart of rock’s lunatic fringes. Simmons has seem more backstage atrocities that you’ve heard drum solos, twisting her tales of drugs, betrayal and raising the dead to show how blurred the music industry’s line between fact and fiction has become” - Q Magazine “Such gallows humour is worthy of Carl Hiassen's darkly satirical rock whodunnit Basket Case. However even the maestro of Florida sleaze would struggle to contrive a rock death as grim as the C&W grand dame here, who's baked alive under her electric blanket and ‘marinated in her own urine’. No wonder Lemmy's a fan.” - N.M.E. “Like a Somerset Maugham of the rock world, Simmons tells dry-eyed, ruthlessly perceptive war stories, set in a disconnected, airbrushed celebrity cosmos. With its quick asides on backstage manners and bar etiquette, this insider's view of the rock business is graphic, extreme and very funny.” - MOJO “Simmons' monstrously entertaining, ghoulishly compelling freak show works brilliantly. It comes with plug quotes from Sharon Osbourne, Lemmy, Slash and Marianne Faithfull, which is odd, as such narcissists are the satire's targets.” - UNCUT magazine “Strange, funny, very cynically observed and very British, with tales of groupies, stalkers, Karen Carpenter cults and washed up rock stars going mad and hoarding their own shit in the fridge.” - LOADED “Revered music writer Sylvie Simmons' fiction debut is a wounding collection of interlinked short stories set in the mad, bad world of rock. The more bizarre the stories, the more believable they are. Because you know Simmons has been there, done that, and bought 'the new concert T-shirt, still smelling of ink.'” - Classic Rock Magazine (UK) “She welds the journalistic faculties of gimlet-eyed observation and epigrammatic description to the fiction writer's gifts of a surreal imagination and a deft touch with credible characterisation. Often simultaneously, she generates both wit and pathos. Macabre enough to induce a lasting frisson.” - The Independent Newspaper (UK) “Exuberantly iconoclastic and potty-mouthed ("Hung like a horse? The man needed tweezers to jerk off"), rock journalist Simmons, having devoted her working hours to making sense of the rockerati, moves inside their fantasies and paranoias” - The Guardian newspaper(UK) “She tempts and teases with individual stories that fit into place like a jigsaw puzzle. Take a front seat and enjoy your journey into rock city.” - The Morning Star newspaper (UK) “A linked collection about ludicrous rock stars and the freak show that surrounds them.” - Entertainment Weekly (US) “In the music business, fact and fiction tend to intertwine and it's impossible to determine which is more outlandish. Thankfully, Simmons doesn't bother to keep them separate. At a certain point, these seemingly real-life cartoons begin to morph and assume, like heavy-rotation melodies stuck in your head, lives of their own. A knowing sendup as arch as it is fond.” - Los Angeles Times “Hilariously shocking short stories, filled with strange scenes inside the gold mine of rock music.” - San Francisco Chronicle “Simmons has seen more than her fair share of fevered egos, outsized characters and oddballs. She cherry-picks the more vivid moments from her career, changes some names and adds her own twisted imagination to shape a batch of occasionally tall tales that read like Raymond Carver stories populated by an army of MTV glitterati.” - Harp magazine, (US) “Reading these stories is like taking a trip into a rock’n’roll twilight zone.” - The Independent Bookseller (US) “Rock journalists are weird. But as a rule, they shouldn't (or really, couldn't) be as fucked-up as musicians, or the crazy music fans. Sylvie Simmons has been there, seen it. The respected critic and writer for The Guardian, MOJO, Rolling Stone and Creem has taken her years on the scene (she got started in 1977) and transformed them to fiction in her collection of short stories. Another rule: Books are always cooler than magazines.” - City Paper (US) “Debut novels to look out for.” - The Observer newspaper (UK) |
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