Books
Foo Fighters: The Band That Dave Made
(Palazzo Editions, 2019)
“If you have someone that's close to you, and they disappear or pass away... Imagine walking into their bedroom full of things every day. That's exactly how playing music felt to me, because that was my whole world. It was difficult to listen to music. I had to disconnect. And I couldn't imagine getting up there and playing the drums with someone, and not thinking about Nirvana. I think about Nirvana every time I sit up to play the drums.”
— Dave Grohl
Ninja Tune: 20 Years Of Beats & Pieces (Black Dog, 2010)
“The enjoyable phase of just making stuff up with sound got overtaken by an increasingly heavy overhead of bullshit. We felt trapped, and suffocated. So we decided, let’s start a label. While in Japan, we’d found a book about Ninjas. They build these amazing houses where they have special traps so they can disappear and reappear somewhere else; they were all about artifice and hidden identity. We thought: Ninjas, they’re cool. So let’s call the label Ninja Tune.”
— Matt Black
Spray Paint The Walls: The Story Black Flag (Omnibus, 2009)
“The kid swings the garage door up, like it’s some wooden curtain, and we start playing. And the first thing that happens is a fight breaks out like three or four feet away from us. All of a sudden, people are all, ‘What is this shit? What the fuck is this? Who are these guys?’ That’s when the bottles and cans and empty cups started flying through the air, and the glass began shattering in front of me, and it got really wild. The dude who was having the party was, like, ‘Oh my God’: all of a sudden there’s five fights in the backyard, and these bikers doing donuts in the front-lawn, ruining the grass and grinding it to mud.”
— Keith Morris
Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story (Omnibus, 2008)
“They’d paid for their own one-way tickets over from New York, arriving with no way to get home and barely enough money to feed themselves for the next couple of days. It really shook me up; I’d never seen a band just throw themselves into another country and hope somehow it would all be alright. They didn’t have a credit card between them, either. It was a mixture of confidence and naivety. They were very emotionally serious, very committed to the fact that this was what they wanted to do, and they would do whatever it took.”
— Paul Smith