Foreground Music: A Life In Fifteen Gigs
Graham Duff
368pp / 210mm x 148mm
30 back & white images
Paperback
£15.99
With an introduction by Mark Gatiss.
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Smashing Stuff. If you want to bluff I was there, read this.
– Vic Reeves
Touching and funny.
- Cosey Fanni Tutti
Foreground Music is an absolute gem. Charming, very funny and often achingly melancholy, Graham Duff's memoir is suffused with a genuine passion for live music and its (occasionally eccentric) power.
- Mark Gatiss
A must have for those of us who escaped our parents’ terrible musical tastes. A love letter to the music and period that defined a generation. Full of joy and pathos, it left me yearning for a world before ‘X Factor’ when music was about something.
– Steve Coogan
Foreground Music is a delight. Not just for music lovers, who will find themselves resonating with much within every page, every paragraph. But also for anyone whose passion for something ignites the desire to consume and experience everything about it, and in doing so, enrich one’s own life and the lives of others through the sharing of the subject’s vitality. There’s something wonderful about the way someone who is so knowledgeable and effusive about a subject dear to them – so much so that it seems a component of their very being – can inspire another to want to come into contact with this curiosity themselves, despite not previously possessing the slightest bit of interest.
- The Quietus
Foreground Music is the result of a lifetime’s passion for gig-going by one of British television’s most individual writers. From a Cliff Richard gospel concert at the age of 10, to his first rock show aged 14, where The Jam play so loudly he blacks out, to a Joy Division gig which erupts into a full-scale riot.
Vivid, insightful and very funny, each chapter covers a different gig, including Primal Scream headlining Glastonbury at the height of Screamadelica, and the troubled reformation of The Velvet Underground. Taking in the first UK headline gig by The Strokes in a room above a pub, and the final arena tour by David Bowie.
Along the way Duff experiences pub-crawls with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, convinces Paul Weller to undertake his first acting role and attempts to interview Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle whilst tripping on LSD.
Foreground Music captures the power of life-changing gigs, whilst tracing the evolution of 40 years of musical movements and subcultures. But more than that, it’s an honest, touching and witty story of friendship, love, creativity and mortality, and a testimony to music’s ability to inspire and heal.
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About the author
Graham Duff is a British TV comedy and drama scriptwriter whose credits include Ideal and The Nightmare Worlds of H. G. Wells. As an actor he has appeared in, among other things, two Harry Potter films, Alan Partridge, and Dr. Who.
