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Customer Reviews
A poet by day, Reed has an eye for detail, description and sentence structure that leave most other biographers significantly lacking by comparison.
His books are intelligent, but not too academic for the general reader, and his ability to analyze and critique the life and work of his subjects is untouchable.
This Marc Almond book, first published in 1995, encapsulates the beauty and daring in Almond's music leaving the reader eager to dust off their copies of `Torment & Toreros' and `Violent silence' for informed reappraisal.
If you like this book, and you would be very foolish not to, then I can highly recommend Reed's slim volume on Brian Jones as the last decadent and also his definitive study of Lou Reed which remains one of my favorite books ever!
In this world, Jeremy Reed published his fan letter as a biography and called it a work of art.
Suffice it to say it's neither.
Biographies succeed if they not only put us in silent observation of the subject's greatness, but also in observation of their flaws, which comprise the other half of their essential humanity. Reed's inability to find any flaw in Almond puts the reader an unassailable distance from him. Almond is the figure we see vaguely from an upper balcony while Reed forever sits beside us, excitedly talking our ear off.
For all its verbosity, this biography never tells us that much about Marc. There is no information about his birth, his childhood, or his adolescence. His time with Soft Cell gets only a vague mention, with five years going by in sixteen pages. Though he complains of small-minded music critics throughout the book, Reed seems incapable of being objective himself. Just as he dispises the critics for failing to appreciate Marc Almond's later torch singing, he himself fails utterly to understand the aesthetics of Soft Cell. Dave Ball is flippantly dismissed as "an offbeat keyboard player," and the group is portrayed as almost an impediment to Marc's own realization of his endless talent.
After that, though, Reed never seems to run out of breathless praise, metaphors involving colors, half-baked gender theory, and emotional cliche to dance around the one central, unexamined fact of this book: Marc Almond is everything Jeremy Reed likes and is nothing Jeremy Reed doesn't.
Marc Almond in The Last Star is the autographed photo, glossy and fey, perfect and paper-thin.
Lovers see the beloved with a unique and peculiar clarity, and this is Reed's strength here. He brings you very close to his subject, but really much closer to the subjective experience of a profound and critical listener lovingly engaging over the years with Almond's diverse art.
Almond's measure of musical genius has grown over the years in reverse proportion to the number of people willing to listen. He started as a star of limited ability and became a has-been of enormous power. Almond has been brave, exploring many musical avenues with rare emotional honesty, making the myriad boulevards of sound glitter. Reed is at least as brave and at least as gifted. His poetry, literary and music criticism is as great as Almond's music; would that more people paid serious attention to both. This book is a fine introduction to Marc Almond, and to Jeremy Reed as well.
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