Accordingto www.goodreads.com The Rough Guide to the Best Music You’ve Never Heard is:
‘…a winning collection of amazing stories of tragic mavericks and unlucky contenders, with hundreds of lost classics and hidden gems. The guide traces the musicians that fell by the wayside from the bands that could have been The Beatles to the acts that were better than the acts that made it.’
I only recently discovered this book (published Oct. 2008) but had I known of it when writing The Singer-Songwriter’s Last Stand it would certainly have been a major source of inspiration. Each artist (around 200 are documented) is given a potted biography and the stories touched on range from tragedy to comedy, often suggesting far greater drama than space allows. The book is therefore just a
starting point, with YouTube and Google, etc, invaluable tools to unearthing all sorts of musical gems. The most fascinating thing for me as a writer is the amazing journeys many musicians take in order to pursue their dreams – often a lot more interesting than the music itself in fact.
One major question the book provokes is, ‘what makes some artists successful and others not, especially when they are patently less talented?’ There is no simple answer of course but ‘right face, right place, right time’ is obviously one. Good management helps enormously. Sheer persistence never goes amiss and, of course, luck usually plays a big part. Personally I have no answers, but wondering what might have happened (to myself and others) is intriguing and also forms the basis of my fiction. Hopefully, my next book (as yet not written) will delve deeper than previously, much of which was autobiographical.