Needle in the Groove: Amazon.co.uk: Jeff Noon: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

we make music down there, all the week/and I have to say, away from the club, the band is even better/we make a noise like I've never known, just this one great stripped-raw channel of searching out/for the first time in years, I'm actually playing something/all the smalltown dregs of flair get magnified and yer know what, I can't help falling in love with the whole idea of being brilliant/to be myself at last, lost in the rhythm

Needle In The Groove, Jeff Noon's fifth novel, follows his short story collection Pixel Juice and confirms him as one of the most inventive and exciting of modern British writers. Set, like his previous books, in a slightly futuristic, reimagined Manchester (where, in this novel, streets are named after musicians and bands such as Joy Division, The Fall, 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald), the book follows Elliot Hill, a bass player and ex-junkie trudging the pub-rock circuit, who is invited to join a new band: fusing DJ artistry, voice and rhythm section, the group's hypnotic groove creation is augmented by a startling new recording technology. The band seems bound for success--until one of them vanishes. Elliot's subsequent search draws him into a secret history of music that stretches back 40 years and into his own past.

Noon's admitted affinity for music over literature as a source for inspiration takes concrete form here: the book takes the idea of the remix as it's formal--and thematic--principle. Where William Burroughs, in the 1950s and '60s, looked to collage--to formal innovation in the visual arts--as inspiration for his textual cut-ups, Noon's spur for rethinking modern prose is the revolution in music in the last two decades: the sample, the mix and the manipulation of sound provide the lexicon and grammar for his experiments with language. Although by no means the first to rethink writing in this way (Kodwo Eshun's "conceptual engineering" in More Brilliant than the Sun or Simon Reynolds' take on dance music in Energy Flash apply sonic invention and mixology to music criticism), Noon's use of musical techniques genuinely attempts to extend the possibilities of fiction. Love, desire, the metaphoric architecture of literature are all reimagined through his "liquid dub poetics": by taking near-clichés of fiction--the tensions between father and son, the (bizarre) love triangle--and subjecting them to the interference of linguistic experiment, Noon balances a compelling, straight narrative against the warped logic of the mix. It reads like a technologised, nervy version of Modernist stream of consciousness, punctuated by the backslash, that ubiquitous partitioner of URLs and familiar of Web-surfers everywhere. Pulp fiction meets dub? Just get into the groove. --Burhan Tufail

Product Description

After years of playing in two-bit bands, Elliot gets his big chance - he meets a singer, a DJ and a drummer who seem to have everything. But just as their first dance record is climbing the charts, one of the band disappears

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Compulsive chemical fiction must-read 9 Mar 2002

By Jay Oh

Format:Paperback

Y'know the old adage that writing about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture? It's a lie, and 'Needle in the Groove' is a near-perfect countermeasure to the cliché. There are moments in this book which capture the vitality of music accurately and beautifully, explaining why so many people love it with a surprising universality of insight. If you've ever played bass until your fingers bleed or just devoted hours of your life trying to find a particular record you think you heard in a club, 'Needle in the Groove' is necessary reading. In a sense it's like the music it describes; Noon's fluid 150 beats-per-minute style drives the story relentlessly onward, pulling the reader into the book in the same way that you can't not dance to certain records.
Perhaps the themes of the characters' relationships aren't new, but there's never any sense of familiarity to Noon's writing. If he has to be categorised it should be part of the underground of young dynamic writers emerging in the territory between Irvine Welsh and Neal Stephenson, collected together in 'Disco Biscuits' and 'Disco 2000' [ed. Sarah Champion].

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Just Beautiful... 31 May 2000

By A Customer

Finally there comes a book which depicts modern music and it's culture in all their (somewhat dubious) glory. From chilled-out ambience and dub through to frenetic funk, banging house/garage and drum 'n bass, the text follows these styles as it is remixed.

At first it is not easy to follow this radical new literary concept, but once you have slipped into James Joyce [on acid] mode, you won't be able to put the book down. Indeed - the narrative encourages the reader to lose themselves in just the same way as if they were losing themselves to the groove of a DJ tunes in a club... You can see it in their eyes, and one can't help but feel sorry that unlike a DJ, Jeff Noon can't see his readers eyes.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Noon has written better 2 Feb 2008

By David Hampson

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Vurt and Pollen and two of my most favourite books of all time so I had high expectation with the first of a pile of Noon books I had missed. Although it was a nice little read it lacked the imagination and daring of Vurt/Pollen and seemed to be trying too hard to be cool-by-numbers (drugs, Madchester, remixes etc) when I'm sure it was uneccessary. Also its nursery typeface means that these 285 pages are not far off a short story - I read it on the train to work over two days and I'm not a particularly fast reader.