Different for Girls: A Girl's Own True-life Adventures in Pop

New
Paperback
2010
$7.70

This is a story of an ordinary girl's transformation from awkward 80s suburban pop geek to 90s jet-set pop goddess. It's about the embarrassments of growing up and experimenting with who you are and how pop music is both the comic and life-affirming soundtrack that runs through it all. Different for Girls is for anyone who ever sang into a hairbrush and slow-danced to Spandau Ballet's True . It's about growing up with Look-In and Jackie magazine and daubing your hair with poster paint to look more like Toyah Wilcox. It's about bad perms, bad boyfriends and the nagging feeling that no man will quite measure up to Nick Heyward from Haircut One Hundred. It's also about the journey from bad band to great band, from gigs in toilets to gigs in stadiums with all the mistakes, joys, disappointments and successes in between. It's a journey which starts with a 12-year-old perfecting her dance routine to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights in front of TOTPs and ends, almost 20 years later, with the same girl having REM's Michael Stipe sing happy birthday to her on a warm summer's evening accompanied by 70,000 strangers.

Synopsis

This is a story of an ordinary girl's transformation from awkward 80s suburban pop geek to 90s jet-set pop goddess. It's about the embarrassments of growing up and experimenting with who you are and how pop music is both the comic and life-affirming soundtrack that runs through it all. "Different for Girls" is for anyone who ever sang into a hairbrush and slow-danced to Spandau Ballet's "True". It's about growing up with "Look-In" and "Jackie" magazine and daubing your hair with poster paint to look more like Toyah Wilcox. It's about bad perms, bad boyfriends and the nagging feeling that no man will quite measure up to Nick Heyward from Haircut One Hundred. It's also about the journey from bad band to great band, from gigs in toilets to gigs in stadiums with all the mistakes, joys, disappointments and successes in between. It's a journey which starts with a 12-year-old perfecting her dance routine to Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" in front of TOTPs and ends, almost 20 years later, with the same girl having REM's Michael Stipe sing happy birthday to her on a warm summer's evening accompanied by 70,000 strangers.

$7.70

Save:$7.07 (48%)

Quantity

Temporarily out of stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Publisher: Ebury Press
Published: 10 Jun 2010
ISBN 10: 0091936519
ISBN 13: 9780091936518
Book Overview: Former Sleeper singer's comically shambolic growing up memoir

Media Reviews

Teen love, bad haircuts, great music and laugh-out-loud memories * Fearne Cotton *
Wise, funny and loving - a brilliant memoir about Britpop and possibly the best rock biography since Nik Cohn's AwopBopAlooBop-AlopBamBoom. * Tony Parsons *
This book is absolutely wonderful - I just read four passages out loud to the Word staff - to actual applause! -- Mark Ellen * The Word *
... funny, readable and filled with proper gossip. Most importantly, it's a perceptive and tenacious look at what it was really like to be a girl among the blokes in that era -- Alexandra Heminsley * The New Review, Independent on Sunday *
(This week Sam has been) laughing, crying and over-identifying with Louise Wener's hilarious memoir, Different For Girls. * Sam Baker - Editor of Red Magazine *

Author Bio

Louise Wener was the lead singer of the band Sleeper and one of Britpop's biggest female stars. She travelled the world at the height of their fame playing to hundreds of thousands and living the high life. In the early 90s Sleeper were briefly lost to a world of glitter, cocaine, paranoia, comically petty squabbles and warped music industry logic. They had three top ten albums, including the platinum-selling The It Girl before disbanding in 1998. Louise has since written four acclaimed novels and lives in Brighton with her husband and daughter.