"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis is one of the best written accounts of a musician’s life. It carefully takes the myth of Elvis and puts it into human terms, giving you a sense of the shock of the new. From childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi through his years in Memphis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, the book puts you in the room with Elvis and his family, friends and collaborators. In the early years you are struck by the genuine innocence and good-naturedness he personified – an accessible small-town boy. Fans would line up outside his mother’s kitchen and he would come out to spend time with them after finishing the family dinner. You can see a kid trying to navigate an unformed world, a world we now know as the modern music business. He was self-aware, though, and brought a new vulnerability and disregard to performing. The first book ends with his mother’s death and his induction into the army, in many ways the beginning of his descent into drugs and isolation. In Hollywood he becomes commodified and put under a kind of artistic house arrest. It is frustrating to read how often his intentions and creative ideas were thwarted. His music had become carefully controlled and the way he had made his great early music was undermined. Later, in the 70s, you get accounts of him gatecrashing the White House and demanding to be made an FBI agent on the spot (Richard Nixon’s henchmen agreed) or starting his Tennessee Karate Institute with outlandish personalised karate uniforms. Though it is impossible for a book to sum up a life, especially one on the scale of Elvis’s, Guralnick’s accounts are ultimately about the impossibility of coming through your wildest dreams unscathed. But it’s more than a cautionary tale: it’s a document of the ways Elvis embodied the childlike and the primal and turned it into a kind of freedom."

"I always say that T. Rex were my band when I was a kid. What I mean by that is so much of my identity was about being a T. Rex fan. A bit like choosing your colours as to which football team you would support, when I was nine or ten I found T. Rex. I was obsessed with Bolan. At that point, coincidentally, they were about to hit their stride as a commercial and artistic force. They had released Electric Warrior and they were on the precipice of being the most important band around. The Slider came out and it had 'Metal Guru' on it. It was a song that changed my life as I had never heard anything so beautiful and so strange, but yet so catchy. 'Telegram Sam' was also on that album and the whole thing was unusually spooky and had a weird atmosphere, considering it was a number one record and they were essentially a teenybop band. It's another one of those records that what you get on the cover is what you get inside. I was a teenybopper at the time. I was ten, eleven, buying lots of records and loving the pop music I heard on the radio. I consider myself very lucky that what was on the radio at the time and the music being made for very young children happened to have some substance to it. T. Rex was pure pop, but it was coming from someone who had had a go at being a hippy and being a mod. The album was very much of its time, and had a sexuality to it that I didn't understand at that age. There is an aspect of the sound that Tony Visconti must have had a large part in, and Flo [Mark Volman] and Eddie [Howard Kaylan] from The Turtles on backing vocals added this odd, druggy spook to the whole thing."