Wednesday 3 December 2014

A Moment Worth Waiting For


A MOMENT WORTH WAITING FOR by KEVIN PEARCE is the first book to be published by Your Heart Out. It has a beautiful cover designed by Per-Christian Hille. That should be enough, but to help provide some context this is a selection of quotes about the book:

A Moment Worth Waiting For is a quietly extraordinary book, as fond as it is forensic. It’s guided by the spirit of “discovery… neglected dusty corners … aesthetics and romance, a passion for learning, a fascination with how things fit together”. It explores songs, artists, imaginative ley lines, moments of possibility that are often left out of histories. If this project sounds personal, well, in some ways it is. A Moment Worth Waiting For doesn’t offer big theoretical statements. But every page is studded with insights, connections and subtle realignments of the status quo.” - Sukhdev Sandhu, The Wire

“I would like to suggest it to everyone who loves music and everything essential and peripheral to its making. A mixture of world class memory recall, gleaning and in the end, fabulous writing. Have a look...” – Stephen Pastel

“Out now in digital format for the price of a modern day, city centre pint is A Moment Worth Waiting For. It’s a glorious mind map of forgotten sounds and styles that continually side steps traditional ideas of writing about music and zig zags across records, scenes and artists honing in on and making connections you are sure to have either missed or more likely never dreamt of.” – Subbaculture
“It’s very much the journey and work of a lifetime. The depth of the research – and / or recall – is amazing; key to the book is the contemporary music criticism upon which Kevin draws, so obviously influential in terms of his developing taste. But those well-remembered moments of discovery are merely the beginning, and it’s the lifetime of subsequent listening and exploration which adds lightly disguised layers of retrospective understanding to each instance of musical epiphany.” – A Jumped-Up Pantry Boy

“Generally speaking I don’t like books about music/musicians, often only of interest to the dedicated music aficionado or fan but of no general appeal, however I have to make an exception for Kevin Pearce’s A Moment Worth Waiting For and I am frankly in awe at the breadth and depth of Mr Pearce’s research. Right from the start Mr Pearce offers up a veritable feast to the reader, leading us down one musical pathway after another, many ending up in totally unexpected territory, but fear not, this is the author’s story and he is the guiding light throughout the book, joining the dots to give us a pretty extensive musical and cultural overview of the times. Quotes from a number of sources are ingeniously inserted in to the narrative, always apposite, in context, always credited and some very funny.  You’ll have to delve in yourselves to find out what is in there for you and there is sure to be something that will pique the interest, illuminate and enlighten you.” - Gertie Grocott, www.vicgodard.co.uk

“Prompted by Vic's mention, talk moves on to Kevin Pearce, the brilliant and prolific writer, researcher and cataloguer behind a slew of fiercely passionate zines, books, and blogs including Hungry Beat, Something Beginning With O and Your Heart Out. Pearce's work is marked out by both its eloquence and its depth of research”. – Helen King, The Quietus

You can also read what people are saying about the book on Goodreads. You might even want to have your say there or elsewhere.

The book is available in digital format through Amazon.co.ukAmazon.com or your local equivalent. 




Sunday 29 June 2014

A Moment Worth Waiting For


YOUR HEART OUT PRESENTS:
A MOMENT WORTH WAITING FOR
by Kevin Pearce

NEW BOOK OUT NOW IN AN EXCLUSIVE ELECTRONIC EDITION

A mesmerising dub history of late twentieth-century popular culture emerges when a writer stops to consider the forces that have shaped his musical explorations.
Set initially over a two-year period at the start of the 1980s, the book zooms back and forth through time, tracing where clues led and how things fit together, to understand better the urge to hear and learn something new, to look at art in a new way.
Part of the focus is on how things were originally presented, how ideas were absorbed, how names recur, and the long-term impact. In that sense it is a celebration of journalists on the music press like Sounds’ Dave McCullough, the NME’s Ian Penman, and several others: the contexts they created, the chances they took, the seeds they planted, the searches they prompted.
Musically, the book starts with Vic Godard’s ‘What’s The Matter Boy’ LP and takes in some of the activities of the ZE, Postcard, Rough Trade, Y and On-U Sound labels, as well as Eddy Grant, A Certain Ratio, Frank Sinatra, Weekend, Pale Fountains, Everything But The Girl, and many others. These sounds in turn lead to torch songs and vocal jazz, ’60s soul and lovers rock, disco dub and afrobeat, bossa nova and samba, skiffle and music hall, calypso and free jazz, Bristol blues ’n’ roots and the Chicago underground, British funk and Nigerian boogie, Greek neo kyma and Cuban nueva trova singers, plus a whole lot more.
The author is Kevin Pearce, whose work includes the acclaimed book ‘Something Beginning With O’ and film scripts for Paul Kelly/Saint Etienne. He contributed regularly to the Tangents website, and ran the irregular publication ‘Your Heart Out’ for five years and fifty editions. This book is an attempt at understanding what has been behind all these words and ideas. The text draws together and elaborates on themes from these and other sources.
‘A Moment Worth Waiting For’ is the perfect diversion for those who love playing with words and patterns and clues, and for those who believe there should be more than one solution to any jigsaw puzzle.

AVAILABLE NOW WORLDWIDE THROUGH AMAZON for £4.50 or an equivalent amount.
Free Kindle reading apps for computers, smartphones and tablets are also available through Amazon.