Let’s not tempt fate, but at the time of writing, this year’s Glastonbury looks set to be a relatively sun-soaked experience, very different from the mixture of Brexit misery and mud that characterised last year’s festival. With any luck, these words will be read by people spending long, languid hours sitting on the grass, staring into blue skies – and, from time to time, reaching for a book.
But what to read? Start, maybe, with one of the best music-based texts of the last two years: Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands by Will Carruthers (Faber). A beautifully written memoir of the time when the author was a member of the neo-psychedelic bands Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, it portrays musty-smelling bohemia in the thrillingly unlikely environs of Rugby, the privations of being a musician while constantly skint, and summer weekends playing fifth on the bill at British festivals. The title comes from Carruthers’s recollection of taking LSD before a performance in Leeds, where he hallucinated that he had grown two extra limbs. “This made perfect sense to me at the time,” he writes, “Three hands are better than none, right?” Then comes the kicker: “I got paid 15 quid for that show.”
Similar anecdotal magic is sprinkled through Lizzy Goodman’s recently published Meet Me in the Bathroom (Dey Street), an oral history of the New York rock milieu that included the Strokes, the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs and Interpol. The usual rock’n’roll staples – drugs, hedonism, nervous crackups – are here, but so too is the overlooked story of the cultural impact of 9/11, and the way it gave thousands of Manhattanites the sense of a common generational identity. The story is 600 pages long, but you’ll probably whizz through it in a matter of days.
Glastonbury is not all about music, and just as Brexit coloured the mood last year, the aftershocks of this year’s mind-boggling general election are sure to be one of this year’s big themes. Jeremy Corbyn is speaking on the Pyramid stage and at the politically inclined Left Field: if you want to get to grips with the more creative aspects of the new movement he has catalysed, have a look at Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, who turn rising concerns about automation into the foundation of a brilliantly utopian kind of politics. Theirs is a vision of technology re-routed to serve human purposes, and a society that might look a bit like the communal idyll that takes over a small corner of Somerset every year.
On Sunday at 1.30pm, the Left Field will host an onstage interview with the world-renowned Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (just to declare an interest, I’m doing it). She’ll be talking about cultural resistance to the nasty populism embodied by her native country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the aftermath of Brexit, and her brilliant body of fiction – the latest addition to which is Three Daughters of Eve (Viking), a story about memory, family and an Istanbul whose collective mindset has been warped by incipient tyranny. “Madness coursed through this city’s streets, like an intoxicating drug in the bloodstream,” she writes. “Every day millions downed another dose, not realising they were becoming more and more unbalanced.” Few authors have such an incisive grasp of the 21st century’s fraught, fretful ambience: hearing her talk about where the world might go next will be fascinating.
And so on to where the world has already been, and a stone-cold classic. Whenever and wherever I’ve ventured out this year, I’ve packed Joan Didion’s strangely topical The White Album (FSG Classics), the collection of essays focused on the 1960s and early 1970s, which begins with her evocation of a breakdown she obviously suspected was a reaction to a world gone mad. “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” she writes. “I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.” She was writing about the America of the Manson murders, the Black Panthers and Vietnam – but what she wrote also suggests auguries of our time, when most attempts to bring meaning to the world founder.
Sometimes, the best thing to do in response is to simply get lost in music, an experience beautifully evoked by my Guardian colleague Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment (Faber). It’s the story of Miles Davis’s 1959 classic Kind Of Blue, and how its influence has lived on, through no end of musical generations. It would ideally be read in the lulls between Glastonbury’s onstage attractions – while, with any luck, luxuriating in those aforementioned azure skies.
• John Harris is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (Harper).
