The End of Music is a collection of poems I've been writing on and off for a few years, all in some way about music – as the title might suggest. It's about being a singer and guitarist in never-quite-famous indie bands, and also rock and pop stars who are no longer with us. People gone too soon. And it’s about the joy of music. Amongst others there are nods to Taylor Swift, Syd Barrett, Lemmy, Prince, Michael Hutchence, Sophie, Metallica’s Cliff Burton, Alice Coltrane, Stuart Adamson, Leonard Cohen, Gustav Mahler, Selena Gomez, more. There’s even one about Pavement that reads as an alternative lyric to their 1994 track ‘Cut Your Hair’.
The poems include descriptions drawn from my own experiences of time as a wannabe musician in bands on the gig circuit in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. Others are a bricolage of mediated and collaged phrases found in music reviews and critical retrospectives, online and in print, including ‘below-the-line’ comments on sites such as YouTube.
To decide you want to be famous as a musician is often to say that something in ordinary life isn't quite cutting it. And so these poems are about making a leap, and about despair and hope in equal measure. That kind of thing.
-MW Bewick
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