The Book of Dave

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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 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'.

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 SelfThe 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. 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] 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. I went to a Northern Soul reunion with Dave in the early 90s and I gave him a suit to wear. It was a beautiful three piece suit made from a heavyweight dark rich grey material called Thornproof, cut in a Victorian style. For some reason I'd had two made, both identical so I gave one to Dave as a gift. He loved it, it fitted him like a glove, he looked amazing. Anyway, I was in this Soul club and there were a lot of leading lights of the Northern Soul scene there and suddenly there was a hush in the room and Dave Godin walked in looking amazing in this suit, and it was almost like a meeting of vampires and Dracula had just turned up!" (MICHAEL SOMERSET, SONGWRITER)

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. 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. 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). He writes in such a fun and quirky way, that I’d find myself laughing out loud quite often. I feel like I got to know him better on a personality level just through the writing. (Picture Book came on).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....

It's still a collection of TMI as one other reviewer described it, from the silly to the nasty and then circling around to the wildly insane. I always get lost once we get into the otherworldly jazz, and the level of crazy is truly appalling. People who hear voices need help. Period, full stop. People who hear voices and *heed* them really, really need help. People .. who hear voices from space and heed them to the point of altering their lives are the frightening, weird cults we read about on the news. 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 ] An aptly named autobiography that really broadened my understanding of Dave Davies. I learnt of his many repressed emotions and feelings on topics, his lifestyle as well as his interests outside of music (it gets a bit Kinky, but it does tone down... thankfully).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. 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. 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 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] 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).

I 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! 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? 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.In a strange kind of way Soul bestows a kind of immortality on all of us," Dave would finally conclude. "Certainly when my time comes, just dig out your copies of the 'Treasures' CDs and what I was but no longer am will still be there alongside you all." (DAVE GODIN) On graduation he applied and was successful in his application to become the manager of Sheffield's Anvil Cinema, the first cinema in the country to be owned and run by a City Council. Here he could indulge in his other life-long passion for obscure films, filling the programs with work by little known directors including, Fedor Ozep, Pudovkin, Gillio Pontecorvo and Paolo Pasolini.