The Best Music Books of 2023

There were many excellent records released in 2023, but it was also a good year for books about music. From the graphic wizardry of Brian Griffin’s MODE to the scrapbook of Yello, there was something for every bookshelf. We have collected our favourites below.

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Brian Griffin, MODE

More than anyone else, perhaps, Brian Griffin created the image of Depeche Mode over their first five albums. At a time when they were capable of issuing an album a year, developing their style with each release, Griffin’s images were the best-known and most-distinctive features of their branding. From a plastic-wrapped lawn ornament to a monumental banner-draped building, Depeche Mode were defined by his eye and the lens of his camera.

Griffin’s best-known shot for Depeche Mode is the stunning picture of a peasant in a field, made for A Broken Frame. It became a sensation and one of the best-recognised photographs of the 1980s.

MODE collects these images, as well as other shots from the sessions and for promotional materials in a limited edition, finely-crafted book. A living archive, it is structured around an interview made for Radio Virus in Sweden. Gareth Jones, who produced three of the five albums with Daniel Miller, provides an introduction.

MODE is an essential read for any fan of the band or music photography.

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Robert Görl and Hanna Rollmann, The Voice That Dwells Within

In 1989, Robert Görl was nearly killed in a car crash. The founder of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft survived but was left in hospital with a shattered body. It could have been the end of Görl’s career in music; but, instead, it marked a kind of rebirth.

Together with Dr Hanna Rollmann, Görl has written a book that traces his path from the clinic to spiritual healing in a compelling and dream-like style. Visions appear of the founding of DAF, the band moving to an Earl’s Court basement flat, adventures in New York, and romance in Thailand. Along the way, companions leave notes with their names, hoping for calls that do not come.

DAF changed the face of music with sequencers and Görl’s drumming. They sang in German and avoided the rock-and-roll conventions of Anglo-American music. With a punk spirit, they created a sound that influenced generations of musicians with proto-techno, EBM and Hi-NRG styles. With this book, Görl fills in the missing details of the band’s history and offers insights into a uniquely productive creative partnership.

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Wesley Doyle, Conform to Deform

The truth is that Stevo Pearce, the founder of Some Bizarre and legendary Soft Cell manager, has more personality than his body can handle. It bursts out in moments of wildness that surprise and scare record company executives. With a love of the surreal and MDMA, Stevo (no one uses his last name other than his bank manager) took a duo from Leeds to global stardom while creating a label that gave obscure industrial acts access to major label resources.

The suits thought Stevo had a good ear for the underground, and they let him release important records by Cabaret Voltaire, Neubauten, Psychic TV, and Coil. Along the way, there were enormous quantities of drugs, episodes of violence, amazing works of art, outrageous lies, and epic attempts to humiliate the record companies that made it all possible.

Doyle has created a brilliant oral history from interviews with the artists who made music for Some Bizarre. Conform to Deform brings to life the controversies and accomplishments of one of the strangest and most influential labels – and its singular boss. 

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Cosey Fanni Tutti, Re-Sisters

The intersection of three lives – Cosey Fanni Tutti, Delia Derbyshire, and Margery Kempe – is explored with references to music, feminism, and marginalisation. Tutti, once denounced in Parliament as a “wrecker of civilisation,” is making a film version of her book, Art, Sex, Music, while contributing to another about Derbyshire’s complex life. At the same time, she is reading the story of the 15th century local mystic, Kempe. Similarities emerge about places, situations, and struggles.

Tutti was a founder of COUM and Throbbing Gristle. She told that story in her first book, including the abuse that she experienced at the hands of Genesis P-Orridge. In Re-Sisters, we find Tutti being blocked from using the music she contributed to by P-Orridge’s estate. It is just one example of how others refuse to accept her voice. Whether from Members of Parliament or family members, there is determined resistance against Tutti being herself. Through her story, we learn how Derbyshire and Kempe experienced similar challenges. Overcoming them is the only choice.

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Yuma Hampejs and Marcel Schulze, Elektronische Körpermusik

The history of electronic body music really began with DAF. Gabi Delgado sang, while Robert Görl played drums. They used sequencers to play the bass lines and pulses that completed their sound, and the feeling was harder than their disco precedents. The approach was functional but also stylistic. In Elektronische Körpermusik, Hampejs and Schulze explore these origins but also celebrate the movement that grew from it.

The book is an ambitious attempt to cover a lot of ground, so Belgian club nights and Swedish radio shows rub shoulders with generations of bands, from Nitzer Ebb to Zweite Jugend. Like Bengt Rahm’s bible of the Swedish electronic music scene, Den svenska synthen, the book offers both breadth and depth in its coverage of an essential musical movement.

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Simon Helm, Walking in Their Shoes

Written by our Editor, Walking in Their Shoes traces the path of Depeche Mode as they played and recorded in London. It locates the venues and studios where the band developed their sound and built their audience. It also includes key locations in Mute Records’ history, such as the Decoy Avenue house where the label was founded. Pictures and public transport details help orient fans visiting the sites. It is the best way to experience London in the footsteps of the band.

 

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Audrey Golden, I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records

If you believe the conventional history, Factory was a group of men making things. There was Tony Wilson, the hero of every story. Rob Gretton, the drug-hoovering manager. Peter Saville, the graphic designer with no sense of time. Barney and Hooky from New Order sulking or scheming like schoolboys. Mike Pickering in the booth at the Haçienda. Everywhere and always, if there was a face to the label and its spin-offs, it belonged to a man.

Audrey Golden sets out to correct the picture with an oral history collected from the women of Factory. From Lindsay Reade (Wilson’s former partner and Factory employee) to Nikki Kefalis (Factory PR and founder of Out Promotion), Golden has tracked down the personalities who did the work, offered the ideas, and found the resources that others have claimed credit for.

There are some gaps – the absence of Martha Ladly jumps out – but this book restores the voices of the participants and fills in the blanks left by XY-biased narratives.

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Boris Blank and Dieter Meier, Oh Yeah

The use of a Yello track in the teen comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, gave the obscure Swiss act a hit. By that point the duo of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, Yello had grown up on the same label as The Residents and were a stable in the record collections of underground DJs. The inclusion of “Oh Yeah,” with Meier’s processed intonation suggesting male lust, opened the money tap and took the band into the mainstream.

Oh Yeah, the book, is drawn from Blank’s archives. It features cuttings from newspapers, press releases, unseen photographs, and notes by Blank and Meier. Yello were from a privileged background, which gave them access to equipment like the Fairlight and opportunities that their contemporaries could only dream of. But it was their love of sounds taken from different cultures, the voices of singers like Shirley Bassey and Billy Mackenzie, and a feeling for rhythms that set them apart.

Placed next to Yello, Kraftwerk seem too serious and Depeche Mode appear naïve. Yello dress like aristocrats and play cards like James Bond. At the same time, they maintain a surrealistic edge. Like the 3D picture disc of “I Love You” that came out in 1983, they have a groove and a sense of humour that are captured perfectly in the book.