Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Harper Perennial 2008)

What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this. But instead, pointlessly, I say, 'Great guitar sound.'

'Yeah,' the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how Doug - or whoever - has been playing guitar since he was a fucking foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles bashfully. It's about all I can do not to punch his stupid, talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops. But - ever reasonable - I just nod and listen and say things like 'yeah?' and 'yeah' and 'great' and 'really?' for a long time.

I hate indie music. Until a couple of years ago you didn't really have to think about it. It was just a couple of hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you've got to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you miss the next one. It's a fucking nightmare.

The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock by John Harris (Harper Perennial 2003)

Noel Gallagher had turned up at his local polling station to find that he was required to produce one more item of identification than he was carrying. 'Do you want me to sing you a fucking song?' he protested, before celebrity eventually got the better of bureaucracy. That night, though the South Bank beckoned, he remained on the sofa. 'I had a ticket for the Labour Party party, but I had that much fun watching Portillo and the others get done over I stayed at home in front of the TV. It was all champagne and cigars round our house. Meg and me got pissed and went out into the garden and played ['The Beatles'] Revolution dead loud with the neighbours banging on the walls.'

Newton Grief

One of those throwaway quotes from a 'here today gone 15 minutes from now' Q & A pieces in a newspaper, where you think, 'Mmm, never thought of that but now that you've said it, you're right:

You'll never find a Manchester band slagging off another Manchester band, but within each Manchester band, people will rip each other apart; Mondays, Smiths, New Order, Roses, Oasis. No one will slag each other off, but inside the band, they'll rip each other to death. [Ian Brown interviewed in today's Guardian.]