“A rock and roll life” it says on the cover. That’s a bit punchier than “sex, drugs and close-harmony falsetto”, though the longer version is probably a better summary as there’s a lot of all three in the book.

This is the autobiography of Graham Nash; working class lad from a poor area of Manchester, founder member of The Hollies – probably the second most successful British pop group of the sixties after the Beatles – friend of Cass Elliot, lover of Joni Mitchell, the N of CSN and CSNY^*, two-times inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and later in life a political and environmental activist, founder of a successful high-quality art-printing business, and photographer whose work is widely exhibited and collected.

Without reworking Nash’s entire life trajectory in this review, the elements in his story that stand out for me are his break with the Hollies, his lifelong friendship with Dave Crosby, and the fundamental importance of music to him as expressed particularly in his talent for vocal harmony.

The teenage Nash grew up listening to pop music dominated by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and other Americans. But as the fifties turned into the sixties British artists started to establish themselves – Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, The Shadows. And then in 1962 The Beatles and ‘Merseybeat’ exploded onto the scene.The Hollies had their first UK Top 10 hit Stay in 1963. At the same time and from a different direction The Rolling Stones, The Animals and other blues and R&B acts were making their mark with British re-working of American black music.

As the sixties progressed a clear change became apparent. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, and later The White Album, showed that pop music could be more than yeah-yeah-yeah. In America country music and pop was also changing, with bands like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Beach Boys moving into fuller. more personal and meaningful compositions. Bob Dylan famously went electric. Joni Mitchell was writing songs like Clouds and Chelsea Morning (though her commercial success was still a few years away).

British bands started going to America. The Hollies toured with reasonable success but Nash was becoming frustrated with their output, which he felt was just offering more of the same.  And in 1967 in Los Angeles he met Stephen Stills, Dave Crosby and Joni Mitchell, and was smitten! Joni – a beautiful woman and talented musician; Stills and Crosby equally talented and glorious close harmony singers. Unable to persuade his good friends and bandmates to change direction and experiment with new material, the following year Nash packed his guitar, broke with the Hollies, and flew to Los Angeles to work with his new friends and become Joni Mitchell’s lover.

Of the other two in CSN – soon with Neil Young making an intermittent and unpredictable third – David Crosby was the one who Nash was always closest to. Throughout the book Crosby is there: Nash writes frankly about their friendship and their fallings-out; Crosby’s excesses with drugs which became so bad that they could hardly perform or record with him; how at one point a group of friends held Crosby hostage while they told him how his addiction was destroying him; his failed efforts at rehab; arrests for posession; physical and mental breakdown. Miraculously Crosby survived and though never clear of drugs at least managed to keep his addiction under control. Nash’s enduring friendship for Crosby pervades the narrative.

And then the singing, which is what it’s all about. Nash and his mates in The Hollies listened to and did their best to emulate the Everly Brothers; Nash clearly has a natural talent for close harmony singing. He describes a night in 1957 at The Odeon, Manchester, when at the age of fifteen he heard the Everly’s record Bye Bye Love for the first time:

I’d never heard anything like it before. … Barre chords layered on top of each other. Two twangy voices harmonising seamlessly as one. … That moment was … one of the turning points in my life. … I knew I wanted to make music that affected people the way the Everlys affected me.

A few years later the Everlys were on tour and played in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall. After the concert Nash and his Hollies bandmate Clarkie (Allan Clarke) tracked down the Everlys’ hotel and doorstepped them at the entrance. To their amazement Don and Phil stopped to have a few words with them.

“We sing like you”, I said. “We copy your style.”
“Are you any good?”, asked Don.
“We think we are”, Clarkie told him.
“Hey, Graham and Allan, keep doing it. Things’ll happen”, Phil said.
It was Allan and me and Phil and Don standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel talking music.

That particular circle finally closed in 1992 when the Everlys invited Nash to sing with them at a concert they were giving in Toledo, Ohio. The three of them performed So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad); Nash says his tape of that session is something he treasures to this day.

There’s much more in the book of course: the other women in Nash’s life; stadium concerts; global music stars; the commercial music business with its promoters, financiers and lawyers; the technical aspects of playing, performing and recording. It’s an autobiography with no ghost writer credited, so of course you wonder how much is true and really happened, and how much is gloss or false memories. But I think there’s enough that is corroborated by other accounts to put those thoughts aside and just enjoy the ride. Unlike too many of his contemporaries in the business, Graham Nash OBE survived. He’s lived the rock ‘n roll life.

* If you really don’t know, that’s Crosby, Stills and Nash – and Young

I probably wouldn’t have read this book if some friends hadn’t given me a copy as a present (thank you, M and B!), and I’m really glad they did.

How can a book which is basically about bike components be interesting? Well, maybe not to anyone who couldn’t care less about bikes, but if you are even slightly into cycling you’d probably like this too. It tells the story of the author’s quest for ‘the perfect bike’ (for him). From bespoke frame building, he goes through every component choosing just the right one. Which is how he comes to visit the Continental tyre factory in Germany to see his tyres being made. He takes his British-made hubs to the USA to have his wheels built by someone called Gravy. He even makes the humble spoke interesting.

In and among he tells the story of the evolution of the modern bicycle from its origins in the ‘Draisine’ created in what was then Saxony in 1817 by Baron Karl von Drais to the ubiquitous present day machine.

So despite its possibly unpromising synopsis, I found this book eminently readable and thoroughly enjoyable. Well done, Mr Penn!

I am in awe of Emily Chappell. Not only does she do amazing things on a bike (see also “Where There’s a Will“), but she writes engagingly and fluently about her life on and off the bike in such a seemingly effortless way. If I could do either of these things one quarter as well I’d be a happy man.

There was a time, a fleeting moment in history lasting barely two decades, when the streets of London were blessed by the presence of people who could be seen gracefully flying and swooping through the cars, buses, taxis and trucks. Balanced delicately on two wheels, fuelled by bananas and coffee, at one with their machines, these were the bicycle couriers. With their eponymous bags over their shoulders, short-wave radios squawking next to an ear, they ferried packages across London using a network of side streets and alleyways faster than most motorised delivery services could manage. Emily Chappell became one of them in 2008.

She writes about the camaraderie, the friendships and feuds of the courier’s life; the special places where they would hang out between jobs and after work; the hay fever in Spring, the heat and grime and sweat in the summer, the freezing, numbing cold in the winter. And in one short lyrical chapter she describes the incomparable feeling of being at one with the bike, balancing and manoeuvring by reflex and instinct alone.

There’s much more in the book, of course: personal stuff, friends and lovers found and lost; chance encounters; some history and characters from the early days of cycle couriering in London and around the globe. And enough pointers and hints of special or unusual corners of the city to make a day’s exploration on foot an attractive project.

Like swallows at the end of summer the couriers have gone now, their jobs lost to high-speed broadband connections. Fashion houses, architects, lawyers and publishers don’t need people to take documents and drawings from one office to another any more. The modern version is far less romantic – the food delivery men and women with their bulky, clumsy back packs who push their way heavily around the streets. They still congregate in their own places though, with careful separation between the cyclists and the motor-scooter riders – at least, that’s the case in Oxford and I expect it’s the same anywhere else. But at least those of us who had the privilege of seeing cycle couriers in full flight still have the memory in our minds’ eyes, and can ourselves hope that maybe just once again on our own bikes we can recapture that beautiful feeling.

An entertaining and thought-provoking personal account of the highs and lows of living life as a single woman.

In the summer of 1967 when the rest of the world was heading to San Francisco to smoke hash and drop acid in Haight/Ashbury, I went to Finland for two months. I lived with a family in a tiny place called Säynätsalo, nearly 300km north of Helsinki. The village was home to a plywood factory, but is unexpectedly world-famous among appreciators of modern architecture as being the location of a Town Hall and library designed by Alvar Aalto. The house where my family lived looked straight at it, as this rather faded picture shows.

Säynätsalo Town Hall, by Alvar Aalto

I had a wonderful time, and have kept fond memories of Finland and the Finns ever since, so I was intrigued when I was lent this book. It was written in 2013, but is a memoir of the author’s experiences sixty years earlier when she went to Finland in 1952 as a fresh graduate in English from Oxford to work as a teacher of English and general organiser for a branch of the British Council in Turku/Åbo.

At that time very few English people had been to Finland or knew anything about it, so Diana Coleman (as she was then) had to try to understand and come to terms with a very different society from the one she had grown up in. Even the fact that the town where she was based had two different names was a puzzle for a while before she learned about the two languages spoken in Finland.

It was interesting for me to compare her experiences with mine some fifteen years later. Looking back at how much England changed from the early 50s to the mid 60s, it’s not surprising that the Finland I saw was different in many ways to the one Webster describes. I also had the possible advantage of having travelled and worked in other parts of Scandinavia. The Finnish society I experienced was less formal than Webster’s, just as England had become much less formal over the same period. She had to learn about the sensitivities of Swedish and Finnish speakers; in Säynätsalo and among the friends and family of my hosts I never met a Swedish speaking Finn. But I recognised other aspects immediately: the crazy state alcohol monopoly, the social customs around drinking generally, the uncomfortable relationship with their Russian neighbour, the way Finns don’t feel the need to fill every moment with noise and chatter, their love – passion – for the simple life, a small cabin by a lake, a sauna.

From her perspective of sixty years on, Webster writes too about how a young woman’s role was seen differently in Finland and England at the time. In England in the 50s women were almost always expected, or even forced, to give up work when they married, and certainly when they were pregnant. She saw in Finland that it was possible to have a job and be a wife and mother. Her time in Turku/Åbo changed her outlook for ever.

Of course it’s impossible to know how accurate Webster’s account is, remembering events and emotions sixty years ago. Even so, it’s an interesting and perhaps surprisingly entertaining account, written with a good degree of English self-deprecation and quiet humour; a glimpse through a clouded window of a period now almost lost.

Title: The Racer
Author: Millar, David
Published by: Yellow Jersey Press
Year: 2016
First published: Yellow Jersey Press, 2015
Date reviewed: 04.17
ISBN: 9780224100083

Except of course he could be counted on. Here in 2014, his final season as a pro, Millar is a respected rider; the automatic choice for the job of team road captain. The directeur sportif plans the day’s tactics but he can’t be everywhere. It’s the captain on the road who sees how each rider is doing, calls the shots, redeploys the resources and hopefully guides the team to deliver their leader to the finish line. Millar knows how to read a race.

While the main thread of the book is Millar’s final racing season he dips into the past for some elements. From the start of the Spring Classics, through San Remo, Flanders and the Ardennes, the Giro, the Dauphiné, the national championships, le Tour, the Vuelta and the world championships Millar’s year unfolds. Along the way you’ll find out what it’s really like to ride a team time trial, to be in a major crash, or to ride Paris – Roubaix.

Two longer episodes stand out for me. Millar’s account of the stage in the Dauphiné when his Garmin team placed Andrew Talansky into the overall leader’s position above Chris Froome and Alberto Contador is a marvellous account of how a successful team works on the road. The other is the poignant story of his stage 3 win in the 2011 Giro when he came second on the stage and found himself in the overall leader’s maglia rosa, only to hear about the tragic death of Wouter Weylandt in a crash. Coping with that personally and on the following day on behalf of the whole peloton endorses Millar’s status as a respected senior rider.

He wasn’t selected for the Tour de France in his final year, which was a big blow. He uses the opportunity to describe the final stage of the 2013 Tour where he leads the race for most of the final laps. Here again the details of how to ride this world-famous circuit give a whole new insight into the race.

So thank you for this book, David. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California and grew up near the Pacific coast where many of his earlier successful novels and stories are based. He later moved to New York and by 1960 had been living there for some time when wanderlust gripped him. He felt he had lost touch with the America and Americans whose lives he had written about in earlier times and wanted to reconnect with them. He had a truck converted to a camper and set out on a road trip with just his ‘blue’ standard poodle Charley for company.

He doesn’t have any great adventures and this is certainly not an odyssey of rediscovery, either of himself or others. It is just a simple account of his travels and the people he meets, written in the sharp spare style for which he is admired. Fifty years on it’s more social history than travelogue. The section that will stick in the mind, though, is near the end of the book when Steinbeck travels through the southern states. 1960 was the time when the protests over desegregation and civil rights were at their height as America struggled towards racial integration. Those old enough to remember will recall the way black children were ‘bussed’ into all-white schools (Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and the March on Washington was in 1963). Steinbeck’s account of the vitriolic and obscene behaviour of a group of women in New Orleans known as the Cheerleaders, who mounted daily protests outside white schools being forced by the Federal government to take black children, is equal to any of his earlier powerful prose.

Yes, it’s the John Muir. Not great literature, but worth a quick skip-read it for its curiosity value.