"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."

"When I did ‘Setting Sun’ with The Chemical Brothers it was based loosely on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Do you remember when it went to number one, what song we knocked off the top? ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. We were like Sir Galahad. 'And she said, 'What about Breakfast At Tiffany's' and I said, ‘I remember the movie.'' And we came in, 'Off with your head you piece of shit.' Revolver was when the sitars really started to come in with The Beatles, and all the backwards stuff on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. It’s their first drug album. The drums sound great on it and it’s a masterclass of how to make guitar pop. That’s just it. They took what the Beatles had been, they did Revolver and then the next week they’re making ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. They’re a completely different band. It’s a cliché to talk about it now because it’s so well-known but this is a mindblowing album. I went to see the premiere of the George Harrison film the other night [Martin Scorsese documentary Living In The Material World] and on the red carpet outside this journalist asked me this question: 'Would you say that The Beatles have been an influence on your music?' I was that amazed I had to take my shades off. I said, 'Is that a serious question?' And he was only young and in all innocence he said, 'Yes. Why?' I was like, 'Are you having me on?' And he was like, 'No.' Now ignoring the fact that it’s me, if you’re in a band and you’re playing guitar, you have been influenced by The Beatles. That really is all you need to know. The psychedelic stuff they did after this was mindblowing and the Fab Four mop top stuff before this was equally as good but on this record it all came together."