Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A tale well told is always something in which the reader must strive to find. Whether it is in the form of a short story, a lengthy novel or the life’s work that forms the whole of an autobiography or the succulent parts that fill across time as serials, the offerings an artist’s endeavour over several books, the tale must be told well and capture the moment, the road travelled.
To come from Birmingham and be considered one of the finest musical ambassadors of the city is a privilege and it is a role that suits The Wonder Stuff’s Miles Hunt perfectly, even if the drummer turned frontman suggests himself that at times he can be seen as hotheaded, especially in his younger days. However, if asking an audience to actually listen to a gig, to take in the thoughts of someone you have paid to see at their work, their living, rather than talk all the way through, then he and many thousands of others who have to deal with the insanity of some crowd members, have an absolute right to moan and curse at times.
The Wonder Stuff: Diaries 86-89 by Miles Hunt is a warm, industrious tapestry of what was once, and thankfully for many fans of music still is; a look back at the time in which the Midland’s band first started out. The fledgling days in which a young lad from the east side of the Birmingham, out past the Birmingham City ground, way beyond the fabled 11 bus route that circles the city like a perpetual merry-go-round and out towards the back of beyond that the N.E.C. shelters in and to whom the adventure begins with meeting like minded people in the form a set of musicians intent on making sure that they would not be ground down in the whole sale destruction being wrought upon cities like Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle.
The book itself is heartening, it has the despondency and melancholy involved but above all it is a rememberance to a time in which Birmingham’s music roots were perhaps to be seen as under threat and yet guarded beautifully by the likes of The Wonder Stuff and all the other bands from the Midlands that knew they were right and the damned infernal machines supplied by corporations were wrong.
This is not so much a book of one man, although being the author and the collector of words, Mr. Hunt deserves to have his own story told in detail, it is more the beginning of history made once more by one of the great bands from the period and to whom even now stand up with absolute sincere pleasure on stage.
Fresh and invigorating, The Wonder Stuff: Diaries 86-89 is a memory worth retaining.
Ian D. Hall