John Niven

In 2022, at the age of 58, Justin Currie – singer, bass-player and main songwriter with the Scottish rock band Del Amitri – faced what might be mildly termed a series of setbacks. In short order his mother died, his long-term partner suffered a catastrophic stroke, leaving her requiring constant care, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. About the first two there was not much to be done but weep. When it came to the third, Currie decided he would manage the ‘Ghastly Affliction’ (the ‘GA’ as he calls it) as best he could with medication and keep playing music as long as he was able to. The following year his band undertook a mammoth 52-day trek across North America as support act to the 1990s Canadian rockers the Barenaked Ladies.

The aim of this book is straightforward enough: a study of the Tiger Slam, the incredible 2000-01 season when Tiger Woods held the Masters, the US Open, the Open and the PGA championship all at the same time. It’s the Tiger Slam rather than the Grand Slam because purists will argue that technically (purists always argue ‘technically’) Woods did not win all four trophies in the same year: he took the British and US Opens and the PGA in 2000 and added the Masters in April 2001. Whatever. The fact remains that Woods is the only player ever to hold all four titles simultaneously. Given how transient form on the golf course is, he is likely to be the only one who will ever do so.

In 1977, in the wake of the death of the king of rock’n’roll, the American journalist and music critic Lester Bangs said: ‘We will never again agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis.’ The ‘we’ was America. And Bangs was right – until June 1984, when Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A. The album’s blend of synths, guitars and colossal drums would vault Springsteen into stadiums. It went on to sell 17 million copies, and for a time made its creator the biggest rock star in the world. Steven Hyden looks to trace who Springsteen was before this moment, what happened to him during it, who he became after it – and, with more difficulty, what became of his audience.

‘John, we need your autobiography.’ ‘I thought I’d express my life experience in song.’ ‘That’ll be fine.’ This would be an odd agreement, and one the world would (rightly) be less than thankful for. But though not everyone plays music, we all have a relationship with prose. And recent years have seen a trend in rock memoirs away from the traditional ‘as told to’ (the method responsible for the footballer’s hagiography that often, in Martin Amis’s phrase, ‘runs the full gamut of human emotions from “gutted” to “chuffed”’) and towards autobiography proper: books written by the artists. That can be a problem.

In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group — both long gone, swallowed up by Warner Bros. That summer some Americans came into our office to pitch us a project. Rather than unfurling some band or singer, they wanted to talk about technology, specifically the internet and what it would mean to our business in the future. They were looking for an investment of around 50 grand. They talked about how, in the future, kids would buy music on their computers and that they would be able to do it anywhere — on the train, in the street. ‘But where will the wires go? Where will you plug it in?’ we asked, back in those dial-up days. ‘There won’t be any wires,’ they said.