Miscellaneous - Book

  by Anthony Strutt

published: 9 / 7 / 2014

Article

‘Memoirs of a Shoegazing Gentleman’ is shoegazing record label and club night Sonic Cathedral's first book. It was written by writer and broadcaster David Quantick from ‘NME’ under the guise of Lord Tarquin, and was originally a weekly column in it between October 1991 and February 1992. The small booklet is neatly presented in itself, and, while it says is a set of memoirs, it is a work of fiction. The narrator of this spoof tale is one of the inhabitants of a posh boarding school, in which everyone else attending it is in a shoegaze band of that era. While he quotes himself as being mates with them, he spends most of the twelve chapters talking of their self-imposed sexual habits towards which he has holier-than-though attitude than the rest of them. I suppose if you are into ‘MAD’ magazine or ‘Viz’ and enjoy rude, politically incorrect 1970's style jokes that this may work for you. If you hate shoegaze, you are not going to buy this book in the first place with a title such as this. While supposedly trying to praise its subject matter, it does the opposite and makes the writer look stupid with this awful piece of schoolboy- humoured prose. It is thankfully short, but is otherwise a really dreadful book.