INFORMATION ABOUT TOTALLY WIRED: POSTPUNK INTERVIEWS AND OVERVIEWS, BY SIMON REYNOLDS
(Faber & Faber, published February 2009)

From the author of the best-selling postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again comes TOTALLY WIRED, a companion book of conversations with the brilliant minds who made the late Seventies and early Eighties such a creative era for radical music and alternative culture.

TOTALLY WIRED features 32 interviews with postpunk's most innovative musicians and colourful personalities--Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Phil Oakey, Lydia Lunch, David Thomas, Alan Vega, Linder, James Chance--as well as other movers and shakers of the period: label bosses and managers like Anthony H. Wilson and Bill Drummond, record producers such as Trevor Horn and Martin Rushent, and influential deejays and journalists like John Peel and Paul Morley.

Crackling with argument and anecdote, the conversations in TOTALLY WIRED bring a rich human dimension to the postpunk story chronicled in the critically acclaimed Rip It Up. We get to follow these exceptional (and often eccentric) characters from their earliest days through the glory and sometimes disaster of their musical adventures to what they went on to do after postpunk. We gain a vivid sense of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.

Along with the interviews, TOTALLY WIRED also includes a bonus "overviews" section: further reflections by Simon Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, art school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery.

TOTALLY WIRED: POSTPUNK INTERVIEWS AND OVERVIEWS - CONTENTS PAGE

PART ONE: INTERVIEWS

Ari Up
Jah Wobble
Alan Vega
Gerald Casale
Mark Mothersbaugh
David Thomas
Anthony H. Wilson
Bill Drummond
Mark Stewart
Dennis Bovell
Andy Gill
David Byrne
James Chance
Lydia Lunch
Steve Severin
Nikki Sudden
John Peel
Alison Statton
Green Gartside
Gina Birch
Martin Bramah
Linder Sterling
Steven Morris
Richard H. Kirk
Alan Rankine
Paul Haig
Phil Oakey
Martin Rushent
Edwyn Collins
Steven Daley
Paul Morley
Trevor Horn

PART TWO: OVERVIEWS

John Lydon and Public Image Ltd: Two Biographies

Joy Division: Two Movies

Ono, Eno, Arto: Non-Musicians and the Emergence of 'Concept Rock'

Mutant Disco and Punk Funk: The non-oral history version of Chapter 20

London Glam City: Poseurs, Dreamers, Heroes, and Monsters from the Bromley Contingent and Blitz to the Batcave and Leigh Bowery.

A final interview: Simon Reynolds