Uncommon People by Miranda Sawyer - Audio Book Review

I had seen someone I follow reading this book and I thought it sounded interesting, so I found it on Spotify and started listening to it. I started in April and finished two months later. This is because I don't listen to audio books a lot - generally only when I'm in the car on the way to and from work once a week. But this was a good book to do that with, because I didn't need to remember much from previously as each chapter concentrated on a different song and band. It was good to dip in and out of. 

Miranda Sawyer is a journalist although I primarily know her as a talking head on different types of documentaries about music. She worked for Select magazine amongst others, and describes herself as more of a pop fan than anything else. But she was working for Select and Melody Maker in the mid nineties, when Britpop was at its height, and she met a lot of the bands involved. So she's the right person to tell this story for sure. 

At the beginning I felt like she wasn't used to reading things out loud because she sounded a bit stilted, but this improved as the book went on. She started with a brief explanation of 'Britpop' and how it came about. As she said, you don't realise you're living in a scene until it's almost over. She went a bit off piste with her choices towards the end, but I understood why and thought the choices that were made made a lot of sense. 

So, she chose one song from a bunch of bands and talked about that band in each chapter. For instance - Girls and Boys by Blur, Connection by Elastica, A Design for Life by the Manic Street Preachers. I was a fan (and occasionally still am) of a lot of the bands, and I knew most of the songs, so some of the information wasn't new to me. But I managed to learn a lot in each chapter - even the Manics chapter, and I was a huge Manics fan for most of my teenaged years. I really enjoyed learning even about the bands that I actively don't like, like The Verve. 

It was an engaging book and one that reminded me of my teens and made me want to listen to all that fun indie pop stuff of the mid nineties again. I might write a zine about the songs detailed, because I think they lend themselves to it and hey, someone already did the hard work for me. 

In all I'm giving it four out of five. Some of the diction did annoy me, and some parts became a bit repetitive simply because they talk about the same people. But I definitely recommend this whether you were there or not!