Full list here Congratulations to the #1, Melissa Auf der Maur and all the other authors given the nod, including several of my list-mates at White Rabbit Books: Bob Stanley, Owen Cutts, and Daniel Dylan Wray. !RECENT NEWS AND REVIEWS!Still In A Dream limited edition T-shirt now available from We Are 1 of 100Publishers Weekly starred review out in advance of the US edition, due

 !NEWEST!Publishers Weekly starred review just out in advance of the US edition, due Jan 12"Like a happier Lester Bangs" - luvvit!Kirkus Review review  also just out, very nice too:A hymn to a musical heyday.In his introduction, Reynolds writes that this book is about "the last great phase of analogue music culture before the internet, filesharing, YouTube and, eventually

! UPCOMING EVENTS! Saturday October 3 - NOVOTVAR FESTIVAL, Bratislava, SlovakiaConversation with Miloš HrochTime: 5pmLocation: V-klubFree and open to the publicTuesday October 20 - ROCK AND ROLL BOOK CLUB,  Walthamstow, LondonConversation with Daniel Avery + Kitty EmpireTime: 6.30pmLocation: Walthamstow Trade Hall TicketsWednesday October 21  -  

Chal Ravens has written a lovely in-depth review of Still In A Dream at London Review of BooksThere's even an LRB playlist so you can listen as you readKieran Press-Reynolds has a really entertaining survey of the stutter in pop and unpop music, from "K-K-K-Katy" to "Melatonin", 1918 to 2026, over at PitchforkThere's a playlist for that piece tooI feel like there's some stutter and stammer

 August is the deadest month.And somehow, even though you've been here so many times before,  you're never prepared for the way  that each week feels deader than the one before. Until finally it's the last week of August and it's like Time's clock has stopped. Hang on a minuteI have a powerful sensation of deja vu. A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any other book this summer, but I feel obliged to draw your attention to a flurry of notable books, made by mates, that have come out recently or are about to come out...For instance, here's the latest from an old friend from down under, Anwen Crawford -  a critical study of the film Morvern Callar  that comes in this daintily

      REACTIONS FROM READERS WHO DIDN'T GET SENT IT FOR FREE"Surprised even myself by how much I enjoyed and devoured this book. Just loved it.... What I really appreciate about Simon's writing is his capacity to trace the lineage of sounds and influences, his thoughtful capacity to put words to ineffable qualities of music....  but perhaps moreso, his ability to see into

Check out Instagram.com/simonreynoldswriter/ for the latest news about the book!NEW!Perceptive  Observer review of Still In A Dream by Kitty Empire - pictured aboveKieran Press-Reynolds chats with his dad for GQ -  long, fun, rambling, occasionally goofy colloquy with my firstbornMy Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The QuietusMoonbuilding - lovely

Just a month now until my new book is out!Below you will find info about the UK tour in mid-June; news about the translated editions in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Turkish;  links to upcoming podcast appearances, interviews, and pieces written by me related to the book; info about the limited-edition zine Fifty Lost Treasures available only through pre-orders at select retailers;

Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.The combination of all those months of heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April -  resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.What did the poet say? The world is charged with the grandeur of God.    It will flame out, like shining from shook

Our Kid with a Rabbit Holed about the wacky world of the Young Wikipedians who are frenziedly  writing the second draft of music history.  (The first draft being the journalism that these shadowy aliased individuals cite and source).  Kieran's piece takes you inside the sausage-making process of how decisions get made on what is "real" and who deserves an entry.....This

Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active  blogs. At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle. At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour. And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. About which I offered: "Adele Bertei rips up the

  Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94. On White Rabbit Books. It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's

Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to early '70s, such

Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. The Rangers review is also a kind of

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.The anniversary celebration  came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but

Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians.  In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that  "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, living or dead, is their

Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQDid a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). Another one worth a look is Carlos Priego's for Le Tempestad&nbsp

A couple of things to read:Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. In

Me and Kieran are going to Argentina this week for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Caja Negra, the Buenos Aires publisher who have put out nearly all of the books of mine that have been translated into Spanish. Actually it takes four to tango because the panel event we are doing on Saturday November 15 at 7pm at the Deseo Club is a quadraphonic colloquy with Argentinian writers Pablo

A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary

Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a  "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of  ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fondling some Astro-turf.

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly

 Fun piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds looking at oblique strategies for digging up weird music, with a hierarchy of engagements mode from basic to ultra-obscurantist.I had to look up the word "ran-through"