Customer Reviews

Powder - A Rock n Roll Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The first half of this book is quite good, and Sampson does a nice job of developing the characters and allowing you to feel what they feel - the fame, the reluctance to it all, the quick embrace of it, the awkwardness of certain situations... But, the author almost seemed to have given up on the novel halfway through. The second half was a chore to get through, and most of the magic that was built in the first half was gone. Overall, a decent read with lots of unrealised potential.

I bought this book because I thought I'd relate to its subject matter, being as I am a musician myself. Sampson does a great job of bringing to life the snotty, self obsessed tortured genius that is the budding rock star. His players are riding the whirlwind of stardom, each one with his own voice.

One of my favorite aspects of Powder was the bizarre almost Clockwork Orange-esque flavor of the language. These moody Brits pepper their slang about in a casual manner, and it is quite a fun read - a "pint of piss" really.

The Grams (the fictitious band that is the subject of the book) are filled with glorious cliche's, especially the emotional lead singer and the deleriously horny drug addict guitarist. The rhythm section plays a bit part in this fable, as they do in most real life bands. At times their rise to stardom reads like a primer for what it's like to get "big" in the music biz, all from Sampson's real life dealings in the industry I'm sure.
Over all, Powder is a fun rock-n-roll fable. It may be enough to get you to finally learn to play that guitar!

The way the book is written--with the idioms and speech spelled out so you can actually hear them talk--this book has a face and a sound. I feel like this work is gritty, right off the street and straight from the heart. IF you want to jump into brit life, start here. Kevin Sampson rocks the house...all blokes, journos, and punters should enjoy

This book has NOT had commercial success in America which completely sucks. If you are into contemporary literature, this is for you. It's time people went out on a limb and strayed from all the mainstreamers who denigrate the art.

In the form of great writers, Sampson makes you feel the characters and identify with their trials and hardships.

The book is about a band, The Grams who are on their way to the top. Getting there proves difficult. Once they cross over into America, shi--er--stuff hits the fan. America wants to change them in it's typical theft-and-repaint, repackage-and-resell manner.

People said the Grams are too brit for the states and so their artistic integrity was watered down. Similarly, publishers have claimed the book too Brit for America. Fie on publishers! Zounds, you'd think people could break out of their americentric modes long enough to breathe in greatness.

Without initial intent to make a statement on AMerica, I guess I have anyway. The crux of this review, however, is that Powder is one of the finest reads of its time. It explores a culture that is brilliant and spoken only softly in America.

Don't be put off by the gaudy jacket cover, this book is a rock'n'roll star. It charts the rise and fall of a scouse super group 'THE GRAMS' and in particular their troubled troubadour Keva McCluskey. I was initially suspicous of the book, it is bound up to look like a cheap holiday read, and I think this does it a great disservice. The characters in Powder could not be better drawn, Sampson's experience as a manager to the early nineties group 'The Farm' is obviously a great source of inspiration for the gallery of lunatics, chancers and ego-maniacs that trip between the pages. All the great themes are here; Drugs, sex, rock'n'roll with Death and Love thrown in, mashed together in a kind of grotesque road-trip. It is Sampson's array of character's that is the books strongest point and the whip-song pace is relentless throughout. Through england, America Ibiza and Amsterdam the band snort and squabble, Powder is above all a good yarn, told well and great fun to read.

If you're interested in a detailed, fictionalized portrayal of how pop bands "made it" in the UK prior to the advent of webzines and downloads, then you might like this book - if you haven't already read the same story in about 10 of your favorite band's biographies, that is. At a massive 500 pages, one wishes the author could have developed his characters a little more beyond the surface typecasting that most of them receive. Moody, introverted lead singer Keva and his lead guitarist foil, the outgoing party-hearty James Love, seem like slightly updated caricatures of Morrissey and Marr, and others such as the ex-junkie rich-kid turned record label head and the various coke-snorting journalists dying to hang out with the band, to say nothing of the bazillion groupies appearing throughout, just seem to have appeared in about 25 of these books already. Ho hum.

Most of the book is instead devoted to the minutely detailed processes of getting the band ahead: planning secret "word of mouth" shows, cajoling good reviews out of rival music trade writers, and traveling to Ibiza to shoot video in between having hippie orgies with the locals. The entire approach to bandsmanship is veddy British and may well be foreign to US readers who didn't cut their teeth on NME and THe Face or aren't into the "manufacture" of a hit recording act. With its emphasis on sales of vinyl records out of record stores, and the need for magazine covers and the like to promote bands, the story also seems weirdly dated set against today's world of digital downloads, band websites, Myspace, Facebook, Pitchfork and the like. From the cultural namedropping throughout, one gets the impression that the story takes place in the mid-90s, when having an e-mail list to promote a band was still a novel idea. The industry and the accompanying technology have evolved so much since then that one might as well be reading a book about Tin Pan Alley song pluggers in terms of relevance.

It's a major effort to read this book, not only because of its length and the minutiae set forth for every step of the band's short, meteoric career, but because the main character, lead singer and songwriter Keva, is so flatly and unsympathetically drawn that one has a hard time caring much if his band, the Grams, makes it big or not. It isn't until the very end of the book that one gets some insight into Keva's motivations for even pursuing a music career, and by then it's about 400 pages too late to give a darn. The author doesn't convey any sense of the musical scene the Grams fit into, the type of music they play (other than that the fans go crazy for it) or what makes it so groundbreaking and great. Hence it's hard to see whether the Grams are really all they are cracked up to be or are simply a good band being propelled too fast by clever marketeers. The ending, focusing on a subplot involving a rivalry with another top band, seems contrived and unbelievable if the Grams really were the "phenomenon" that they are presented as being.

This is the type of book I'd have enjoyed when I was 15 and seeking to learn how the "music industry" works. As an adult reading for pleasure, I found it about three times as long as it needed to be and very tedious.

This is a terrible, terrible re-write of the original 1999 novel.
This is so cut up with product placements that the story is thrown out the window. Avoid this at all costs, and seek out the original edition.

Kevin Sampson clearly knows what he is talking about - the characters have some depth and the stories are are laugh out loud funny. One other thing to note - Sampson is obsessed with weird sex.

I bought this book to get an inside view, however fictionalized, on what it's like to be an up and coming band in England. For that purpose, this book is good. In terms of other things you buy novels for... such as characters, dialogue, good writing, etc... it's appalling. The characters are so flat it's really a chore to read.

I'm amazed that a rock 'n' roll story could be so incredibly boring. If Sampson's intent is to show that rock stardon is attained through an incredibly tedious process, I gues he's succeeded, but, if his intent was to write a readable novel, he's failed miserably.

I'll stick with "Behind the Music."