Talking Heads, Paul Weller, Paul McCartney... the 10 best music books of the year
Some of Eoghan O'Sullivan's favourite music books of 2025
Spotify felt like the future when it arrived — every song, every album, all in one place. But as criticism around its meagre artist payouts and co-founder Daniel Ek’s links to AI and military tech has sharpened, so has the need for a reckoning. Liz Pelly’s investigation, featuring more than 100 interviews with insiders, former employees, and musicians, lays out how Spotify has reshaped listening for the worse. She also offers solutions, such as community and local music scenes.
This one starts slow, going a little too deep on David Byrne’s childhood and schooling, but once it gets going it’s electric. Jonathan Gould, a contributor to the New Yorker, builds to the buzzing New York scene of the mid-1970s, with Patti Smith, the Ramones, and CBGBs all featuring prominently, and Talking Heads at its epicentre. He also follows the development of a city which allowed art and music to bloom amid the urban dystopia of Lower Manhattan.
Macca follows his recent lyrics book alongside Paul Muldoon by looking back at the band that came after the Beatles. As editor Ted Widmer writes, McCartney, with single-mindedness, sought to reinvent himself as an artist. Irish lead guitarist Henry McCullough was among Wings’ initial lineup, while their first single was ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, in response to Bloody Sunday. From college circuits across the UK to whirlwind trips through Japan, the tales here show McCartney’s post-Beatles adventures could rival the mythology of the band itself.
We can’t have a list without the Beatles. Ian Leslie, an author focused on psychology, turns to the budding bromance that defines the band. “This is a book about how two young men merged their souls and multiplied their talents to create one of the greatest bodies of music in history,” Leslie writes. He looks at the intertwined lives of John Lennon and McCartney — bonded by grief, fuelled by rivalry, and elevated by a songwriting chemistry that reshaped popular music.
Billed as her 'most intimate memoir yet', covers Patti Smith’s luminous journey from a post-war childhood in condemned Philadelphia row houses to the stages, studios, and quiet Michigan shores that shaped her life. She recalls leading her band of siblings through imagined kingdoms, discovering poetry and music as lifelines, and later building a tender, creative world with her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. Grief, devotion, and art seep through the page.
A love letter to a vanished nightlife. Ronson owns his nepo-baby advantages, but the book’s pulse is the graft: Lugging record crates up walk-ups, crate-digging for hours, studying the radio DJ Stretch Armstrong, and chasing the alchemy of a perfect mix. Featuring cameos from Biggie to Michael Jackson, Ronson looks back with tenderness and clarity, capturing the thrill and community of the nights that shaped him.
Berghain Nights dives into Berlin’s techno mythology at a moment when the city’s club culture faces existential pressure from rising rents and rapid gentrification. Liam Cagney blends reportage, memoir, and clubland folklore as he roams Berghain’s vast, near-mythic interior, interviews DJs and promoters, and builds up a vivid scene where hedonism and self-discovery blur. From Donegal raves to mushroom-fuzzed epiphanies on the dancefloor, his journey mirrors the cyclical rise and decline of Berlin nightlife itself. The result is a personal and surprisingly tender portrait of a culture fighting to stay alive.
Budgie is Peter Clarke, who came of age in working-class St Helens, shaped by the early loss of his mother and the electric ferment of Liverpool’s Eric’s Club. The Absence is an unflinching, deeply felt memoir of a life lived at the centre of post-punk’s most mythologised circles. From The Slits’ Cut to the Banshees’ most celebrated work, Budgie traces the creativity and collapse of his artistic and personal partnerships with raw clarity.
Bless Me Father is Rowland at his most candid, tracing a turbulent path from Birmingham altar boy to the mercurial force behind Dexys Midnight Runners. Rowland recounts a youth split between piety and petty crime, the creative explosion of the late 1970s, and the chart-topping highs of the early ’80s - alongside the self-destruction that shadowed it all, including addiction, bankruptcy, and exile in the ’90s. Eventually there is reinvention once more, culminating in a 2024 Glastonbury triumph.
A comprehensive portrait of Manic Street Preachers - a band forged in the post-industrial valleys of south Wales and reshaped by grief, survival, and sheer creative will. With full co-operation from the group, Keith Cameron traces their journey, framing the story through 168 songs spanning 1988’s Suicide Alley to 2025’s Critical Thinking. Why 168 songs? It’s steeped in Manics folklore - according to Motown Junk, the band’s third single, the number is the length of time a love song stops your heart beating and your brain thinking.
The Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando is one of those artists/drug addicts who probably shouldn’t be here, releasing a long-awaited memoir about a life lived at full tilt. He writes that a couple of years ago, he finally got sober. “Martha’s Vineyard is a tough place to be a junkie. Everybody knows you there. It was impractical and embarrassing.” A ’90s pin-up and reluctant alt-rock icon now settled in South America, he reflects on how he might never have become a musician if his father hadn’t left the family.
Drawing on more than 200 hours of exclusive interviews, Jennings assembles an absorbing oral history that follows Weller from The Jam’s razor-sharp beginnings to The Style Council and a solo career that’s delivered No 1 albums across five decades. With access to family, bandmates, producers, and longtime collaborators, Jennings reveals the creative drive, stubborn vision, and personal triumphs behind one of Britain’s most enduring songwriters.
Mark Hoppus offers a sharp, funny, and tender memoir going from restless ’80s latchkey kid to co-founder of Blink-182. He revisits the adolescence, the accidental alchemy that formed the band, and the anxiety that threaded through it all. With wit and honesty, Hoppus also reflects on his recent cancer battle and hard-won optimism.
A wild, immersive tour of London’s noughties nightlife. Arriving in the city at 15, Harsh navigated clubs, underground parties, and the chaotic collision of music, fashion, and art. “Something special happened in this era,” writes the DJ and drag queen. Scenes collided, exploded, were reborn and reshaped, all across town at rapid speed. New music, new fashion, new art… it all came together in a mad heady rush before a huge crash.”
Veteran NME writer Stuart Bailie looks back on four decades inside the slipstream of popular culture, drawing on encounters with everyone from Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan to Nina Simone, Bjork, and Sinéad O’Connor. These collected pieces examine Radiohead, Oasis, Primal Scream, U2, the Manic Street Preachers, and more big guns. A sharp and elegiac chronicle.
- Steely Dan - Reelin in the years by Brian Sweet
- Truly by Lionel Richie
- Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion by Chris DeVille
- Heartbreaker: A Memoir by Mike Campbell
- The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography by Peter Ames Carlin
