Dave buries the book, which is discovered centuries later and used as the sacred text for a dogmatic, cruel, and misogynistic religion that takes hold in the remnants of southern England and London following catastrophic flooding. The future portions of the novel are set from 523 AD (dating from the purported discovery of the book). The island in the novel is inspired by the hilltop town of Hampstead in London and its famous parkland Hampstead Heath. In the book, Self describes a future England which has been inundated with rising seas, leaving Hampstead as the only remaining part of London. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. The geography of the island, illustrated in a map at the start of the book, bears close resemblance to the modern areas of Hampstead which inspired it. [5] Contemporary narrative [ edit ]

This wasn't the crapola slush of popular music expounded by white folks, this was real men and real women, as opposed to boys and girls, talking about real passions and hard emotions."... Davies writes at length about his deep interest in the esoteric, an enthusiasm for the unexplained that dovetails into a penchant for the occult. His nervous breakdown in the early 70s makes for painful but cautionary reading. In 1982, there was an encounter with what he calls “the Intelligences” – mysterious beings with whom he enters into “telepathic exchange”.What about the other victims, the "motos", accidents of genetic engineering that look something like pigs but speak with the accents of affectionate toddlers? For the self-gratifying Manhattanites of an earlier story, "Caring, Sharing", Self had invented "emotos", giant semi-humans who provided hugs when childish humans needed emotional solace. "I am intrigued by anthropoid species that are not human." The motos were there to represent the loss of a relationship between the denizens of Ham and their children. The unsettling slaughter scene in the first chapter was, Self revealed, "lifted" from a so-called children's book: Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Little House in the Big Woods. This has "an amazing description" of slaughtering the family pig, which astonished him as he was reading it to one of his children. "A vivid portrayal of what it is like to live with nature." Self called the moto slaughter "tender, affecting and charming", with perhaps a hint of his trademark mordant irony. On the isolated island of Ham, a tiny community ekes out an existence from the land, assisted by semi-intelligent pig-like creatures known as 'motos' that are unique to the island. The community lives according to the severely enforced religion of the country known as "Ing" (i.e. England) whereby men and women lead separate lives but share childcare in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Dave, which is regarded as a sacred text, but which is evidently the book written by Dave Rudman and buried in a Hampstead garden some two thousand years earlier. A young male 'Hamster', Symun Devush, explores a forbidden area of the island and emerges claiming that he has discovered a second Book of Dave that repudiates the tenets of the first. Although Symun's revelations are popular, and he is lauded throughout the country as a prophet, religious authorities from the reconstructed city of New London send a deposition that arrests Symun on a charge of heresy (or 'flying') and transports him to New London, where he is physically and mentally broken, his tongue torn out, and returned to live in isolation on the desolate outcrop of land known as Nimar, not far from Ham. I also appreciated Dave Davies' candid comments about the man whom he loves dearly...yet who has used and abused him all his life...his genius older brother Ray Davies It is their tortuous relationship that is at the heart of KINK. From what Dave Davies says...its a bonafide miracle that he and his brother were able to stay together (as a band) for as long as they did..it also gives fascinating insight into why The Kinks eventually broke up...never to reunite again (at least as of this writing). The 1990s saw Dave's professional return to Soul music with the critically acclaimed and best selling CD compilations, 'DAVE GODIN'S DEEP SOUL TREASURES' for the Kent/Ace label. The final release compiled and released shortly before his death. Raised in a household short on cash but big on maternal love, Grohl believes he probably had ADHD, such was his restlessness and inability to turn his natural curiosity into good grades. While his mother, whom he adores, encouraged him to seize the day, Grohl’s divorced father disowned him when he dropped out of school to join punk band Scream, playing venues Grohl wasn’t legally allowed to enter because of his age (he had lied to get the gig).

I signed up here to review some good books, and in the process found the Dave books come up. They're awful. Not the quality of the book, but the content, the actual substance. We get to know Dave in ways we didn't want to, and it doesn't improve our opinion of him. The Kinks get a crap bath as well, stories that may or may not be true. I remember on an EP many years ago, a live concert, Ray referring to his 'delectable brother'. I won't say how, but there is an event mentioned throughout the book (it's not exactly mentioned. It's more like a re-occurring nightmare that haunts and troubles Dave and gradually starts to involve the reader as it finds its way into almost every chapter of the book) that changed Dave's life (for the better or worse depends on whose side you're on) and near the closing of the book something on the breach of unbelievable happens that made me cry with sadness. Or maybe it was joy. I'm not 100% sure, by this point it was around midnight and I was too tired and confused to figure out what category of crying mine fell under. The Book of Dave tells the story of an angry and mentally ill London taxi driver named Dave Rudman, who writes and has printed on metal a book of his rantings against women and thoughts on custody rights for fathers. These stem from his anger with his ex-wife, Michelle, who he believes is unfairly keeping him from his son. Equally influential in Dave's book is The Knowledge—the intimate familiarity with the city of London required of its cabbies. The Book of Dave can be considered to be a parody of modern religion especially with regard to blind faith. For example, the "Hamsters", the inhabitants of the island of Ham (actually the higher, unflooded part of Hampstead Heath), believe that certain verses out of the book are sacred "hymns", where in fact they are just excerpts from The Knowledge. Additionally, aspects of Dave's life are ritualised into legal requirements: such as "changeover", the act of custodial exchange of children, and parents being forced to live apart even though they would be happy living together. "This challenges the assumption of whether people should follow something just because it is written in an old book." — Will SelfI thought the biography would take about six months to research and complete until I discovered how many facets there was to Dave Godin. Over six years later, here we are! For anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing... Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked... Grohl is a lively and thoughtful writer.' - Kitty Empire, Observer And there's worse things to be than Ray Davies. Many of Dave's tales of his elder brother are derogatory, but honestly do we even know if they are true? Someone with this level of 'issues' such as voices in the head from outer space. Do we trust their stories as gospel?

I used to go to all the 'do's' where Dave used to rent a room above a pub and you'd get The Four Tops performing!" recalls Graham Moss. "There would be a reception for society members and whenever groups and singers came over to play there'd be a meet.... He once booked in a Russian film from the silent era and I don't know how he dared book it 'cos it had Russian sub-titles and no one could understand it. But he had them all translated into English and each sub-title put on a postcard. As the film was shown Dave stood there at the front of the cinema with a little light over a lectern and as each sub-title came up he read the translation out loud from the postcard. The cinema was full that night and the audience reaction to Dave reading out each Russian sub-title in English was one of true amazement!" (ANVIL ASSISTANT MANAGER DENNIS O'GRADY) Dave suffers a breakdown, and comes under the care of the psychiatrist Anthony Bohm. Despite discovering that Carl is actually Cal's son, Dave slowly recovers his sanity and, during a stay in hospital, forms a relationship with Phyllis Vance, the mother of Steve, another patient. Dave regrets the content of his book, and attempts to dig it up from the Hampstead garden, but fails. Dave moves into Phyllis's cottage on the fringes of outer London and, under her guidance, writes a second book that repudiates the content of the first, and recommends a life based on tolerance and freedom. He mails the new book to Carl, but shortly afterwards is confronted at the cottage by loan sharks to whom he is heavily indebted. Dave brandishes a shotgun but is fatally injured in a struggle with the men, who arrange the scene to make the death look like suicide – an arrangement that is readily believed by Phyllis and the police. Carl and Cal then place Dave's second book in a metal film canister and bury it in their garden. I don’t know how this autobiography doesn’t have a 5 star rating. It took me quite the while to read, but only because I was fighting off a book slump. The late 70s saw a massive change in direction for Dave Godin, first a move to Lincolnshire, his involvement with the Right On! record label (responsible for the first UK release of 'Your Autumn Of Tomorrow' by The Crow) and then a permanent location to the steel city of Sheffield to study Film & Art History as a mature student at the city's Polytechnic.

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With Scream suddenly defunct, Grohl hears on the grapevine that Nirvana – then merely well-regarded – were interested in him. His second secondment finds him (not) sleeping on Cobain’s couch, kept awake by the butting of a desperate terrarium tortoise. Until he gets his first pay cheque, an emaciated Grohl eats nothing but cheap corndogs from a petrol station. For anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing... Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked... Grohl is a lively and thoughtful writer.' Writing in The Guardian in 2007, the author said he was inspired to write the book after having read The Bible Unearthed, a text that claims that archaeological discoveries imply that large elements of the Old Testament have no basis in historical reality whatsoever. [4] He writes that he intended to suggest imaginatively the notion he received from Finkelstein and Silberman's book, namely that revealed religion is a necessary function of state formation, and that the content of this or that holy book is irrelevant, compared to what people make of it. [4] At the same time, reports of increased raisings of the Thames Barrier had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis. [4] The book resembles, in part, Riddley Walker, a 1981 novel by Russell Hoban [2] written in a similar phonetic manner and also set in England centuries after a major disaster. Self provided an introduction to the new 2002 edition of Hoban's book. [3]

To "chip" the tablets, they must be used on the spellbook or vice versa. The same must be done to store them in the book. Thumbnail sketches of the brothers at the heart of the Kinks habitually paint Ray, the elder, as the more complex and deep-feeling character, and Dave as flamboyant, more forthcoming and into UFOs. A lifelong square peg, the younger Davies is every bit as hard to pigeonhole as his sibling, swinging between the weary defence of his input to the band – always the subject of contention between Team Ray and Team Dave – and low self-esteem. Kinks fans will be familiar with the retelling of the band’s serpentine ups and downs, both musical and financial, how a ban on touring the US in the late 60s resulted in the Kinks turning more parochial and producing social commentary and albums such as The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, an Englishness that fed into punk and Britpop. Less familiar are the latterday updates, like Davies’s reunion with his teenage flame and their daughter, 30 years down the line. The two young lovers were forcibly separated by their parents; the loss of Sue and baby Tracey haunts Davies throughout his life. More unsettling to some readers was the violence in Self's book. Why did he include such graphic scenes of torture? In the replica London constructed somewhere north of Nottingham, the cityscape is dominated by a giant wheel that is an engine of torment on which heretics are broken. A mother is executed at Marble Arch while her children look on. The questioner evidently found the precision of these episodes disturbing. It was all taken, explained the author, direct from accounts of what happened at Tyburn in Elizabethan London.

Dave would have been a good musician, but he was always trying to be, Not Ray. Therefore, the whole 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else' was really, 'I'm Not Ray Davies'. As with many memoirs, artists’ origin stories can resonate far more sonorously than their victory laps; so it is with Grohl’s. Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked as he lurches from high jinks with Italian tattooists to Dutch squat riots. From his teenage discovery of Rhythm & Blues in 1950s Bexleyheath, walking into his favourite Friday night haunt, The Silver Lounge ice-cream parlour, and being instantly and utterly devastated by Ruth Brown's '(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean', blasting out from an American jukebox freshly installed in the corner of the room. I love The Kinks, hell, I’m listening to them as I write this very review (Drivin’ is the song, if you wanted to know). Most people know their 1964 hit You Really Got Me, including my fellow Zoomers thanks to TikTok, but they are criminally underrated wholly. (The song changed- Days just came on). They wrote songs about their childhood, which give ME nostalgia, despite being just a listener. Come Dancing, an upbeat hit of theirs during the 80’s, is profoundly sad when you find out the story behind the song. (Dead End Street came on now).