Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor
by Dave Haslam

342 pages
Publisher: Constable

In the late 1970s, Dave Haslam was a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan. Four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester. Into the story of those intervening decades, Haslam weaves a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city and the impact of a number of life-changing events, from the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack.

The cast of Haslam's life reads like a who's who of '70s, '80s and '90s popular culture: from having Morrissey to tea and meeting writers such as Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen to discussing masturbation with Viv Albertine and ecstasy with Róisín Murphy, via having a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda and a drug dealer threatening to slit his throat, this is not your usual memoir.

Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and the birth of the rave era, and how music has soundtracked a life and a generation.