Shopping for food, trying to work out what's going on, playing my favourite music in clubs to excited people who haven't given up on life, writing.
Sonic Youth, Trinny, Joyce Carol Oates, and someone who knows where the TV remote is hiding.
NYPC, Ursula Rucker, Ladytron, Joy Division & New Order, the Fall, Sonic Youth, Italo piano house 1989-92, the Stone Roses, Public Enemy, Metronomy, Jazzanova, some Faithless, most Royksopp, plus that Rui De Silva 'Touch Me' record from about five years ago, 'Ain't Nobody', the Gang of Four, the Stooges, Doves 'Black & White Town', Massive Attack, the Sonar Kollectiv label, 'Headache in My Heart' by the Debonairs, 'This is Love' PJ Harvey, and 'Pretty in Pink' by the Psychedelic Furs.
Buffalo 66, Somersault, The Alcohol Years, Do the Right Thing, Quatre Cents Coups, Casino, Mean Streets, the Ice Storm, Stranger Than Paradise.
The Peep Show, Soccer Saturday, Channel 4 News.
I love to read, and if I get a chance to read it's mostly American novels/short stories; Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Douglas Coupland, Paul Auster, John Updike. My fave dead writers include; James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and Sylvia Plath. There are also writers whose work has definitely influenced my own books; Jon Savage, Andrew O'Hagan, Don McRae, Craig Werner, Lemn Sissay, Eric Hobsbawm.
I have written three books, the first one was published in 1999...
'Manchester, England' which I hope you've read. Written more than 7 years ago, but still selling 55 copies a month on average, probably mostly to bewildered students doing dissertations on rave culture. I think also people who are mentioned in the book keep buying it to pass on to their grandchildren. Fopp in Manchester sell more than the rest of the world put together; bless them.
'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel' (2001) about the history of club culture, with chapters on Guy Stevens who played at the Scene back in the pre-mod days, Fatboy Slim, Sasha, Lottie, DMC DJ mixing championship; history stuff but lots of fly-on-the-wall, gonzo-style interview material too. Staying up late with Lottie, trying to make sense of a Paul van Dyk set (and his crowd too; blimey).
'Not Abba' which came out in 2005 (reviews below); England in the 1970s; a long way from all those I Love the Seventies programmes. The real deal; drugs, Led Zeppelin, racism, Life on Mars, Barbarellas in Birmingham, Erics in Liverpool, rock pubs in Stockton-on-Tees...
'NOT ABBA; the Real Story of the 1970s' ...
"A blistering attack on the nostalgic sanitisation of a troubled decade." (Robert Sandall, The Sunday Times)
"A brilliantly contextualized study of a decade of cultural and political upheaval, seismic shifts in fashion and youth trends, and the ever-changing musical landscape. The results are worthy of shelf space next to Jon Savage's England's Dreaming or Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces." (Terry Staunton, Record Collector)
"Breathless and compelling. Haslam plays more than few aces, cutting his subject into free-flowing chapters that move at speed between politics, music, and personally rendered social history." (John Harris, The New Statesman)
"Haslam is determined to set the record straight and offers an exhaustive survey of a Seventies the revival merchants want to avoid." (The Guardian)
"Coming so soon after Simon Reynolds equally essential history of post-punk, Not Abba is a gloriously messy lurch through a time long passed....The eyewitness accounts illuminate the book with touching candour." (The Glasgow Herald)
"It's a fast moving, accessible book, using extensive research and first hand accounts from musicians, writers and artists and everyday people to give a well rounded account of the times. If it was Haslam's intention to remind us the decade was far more interesting (darker, more exciting, dangerous and creative) than the popular I Love the Seventies, he more than succeeds." (Clash Magazine)
"The 'Abbafication' of the 1970s, fuelled by nostalgia television and bland compilation LPs has created a sort of cultural amnesia, and Dave Haslam sets out to restore what careless editors have gradually stripped away. It's an appealing idea and Haslam tells the story with an enthusiastic and discriminating eye." (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Telegraph)
"An amazing portrait of the decade" (Phill Jupitus, Radio 6)