Nick Soulsby – författare

Before #MeToo, before Riot Grrl, there was Lydia Lunch. A central figure in the No Wave scene of the seventies as founder of the seminal Teenage Jesus and The Jerks Lunch has pursued a four decade long career turning the substance of her life into unapologetic, stark, and beautiful art. From the eighties onward, Lunch became a lone voice publicly calling out the patriarchal aggressions and day-to-day violence enacted by the powerful and never gave a good goddamn whether you wanted to hear it or not. Refusing to be silenced, she took to stages the world over, fearlessly speaking the truth, whether of her own life with its legacy of parental abuse, of her wild times owning the streets of New York City, or of the world she saw around her. Seeing no boundaries between creative mediums, Lydia has enacted her vision through music, spoken word, film, theatre, and more. Released as an accompaniment to Beth B s new documentary The War Is Never Over, this book is the first comprehensive overview of Lunch s creative campaign of resistance, a celebration of pleasure as the ultimate act of rebellion. Across these pages, Lunch and her numerous collaborators including Thurston Moore, Jim Sclavunos, Kid Congo Powers, Bob Bert, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, and Vivienne Dick recount life at the frontline of the musical extremes of the seventies and eighties underground, the wild times, the disciplined productivity, life lived as a defender of the voiceless, and an unapologetic force of righteous fury.

I Found My Friends recreates the short and tempestuous times of Nirvana through the musicians and producers who played and interacted with the band. The guides for this trip didn't just watch the life of this legendary band-they lived it. Soulsby interviewed over 150 musicians from bands that played and toured with Nirvana, including well-known alternative bands like Dinosaur Jr., The Dead Kennedys, and Butthole Surfers, as well as scores of smaller, but no less fascinating bands. In this groundbreaking look at a legendary band, readers will see a more personal history of Nirvana than ever before, including Nirvana's consideration of nearly a dozen previously unmentioned candidates for drummer before settling on David Grohl, a recounting of Nirvana's famously disastrous South American shows from never-before-heard sources on Brazilian and Argentine sides, and the man who hosted the first ever Nirvana gig's recollections of jamming with the band at that inaugural event. I Found My Friends relives Nirvana's meteoric rise from the days before the legend to through their increasingly damaged superstardom.More than twenty years after Kurt Cobain's tragic death, Nick Soulsby removes the posthumous halo from the brow of Kurt Cobain and travels back through time to observe one of rock and roll's most critical bands as no one has ever seen them before.

'I'm no stranger to failure, and I'm aware it can arrive at any minute-as it often has. You have to keep things close to your chest and be aware of what's really important: the work, not everything around it. If you have faith in the work, then the people will come ... it's an artistic imperative, it has nothing to do with public perception or career or any of that crap. The name, Swans, it's synonymous with who I am, but it's how it's achieved and it's achieved by people-those people need to have total commitment to making this sound and to making it utterly incisive and uncompromising. The work is everything and it has to-at least at the time-appear, to me, to be stellar. That's the prerequisite. It's an intangible thing where it really speaks and has some truth within it.' Michael GiraOver a span of some three and a half decades, Michael Gira's Swans have risen from chaotic origins in the aftermath of New York's No Wave scene to become one of the most acclaimed rock-orientated acts of recent years. The 1980s' infamous 'loudest band on the planet' morphed repeatedly until collapsing exhausted, broken, and dispirited in the late 1990s.Swans returned triumphantly in 2010 to top end-of-year polls and achieve feted status among fans and critics alike as the great survivors and latter-day statesmen of the underground scene. Throughout, Gira's desire has remained to create music of such intensity that the listener might forget flesh, get rid of the body, exist as pure energy-transcendent-inside of the sound.Through these pages, the musicians responsible tell the tale of one of the most significant bands of the US post-punk era. Drawing on more than 125 original interviews, Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence is the ultimate companion to Swans and their work from the 1980s to the present day.