Rock and Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Frontlines and Assorted Sideshows

Arts & Photography

Mueller, Andrew

BONO

Music

Virgin Books

i-wouldn-t-start-from-here-a-misguided-tour-of-the-early-21st-century

Picador Australia

Carn

Sports & Outdoors

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd

What is a jaded rock journalist doing dodging landmines to talk to mercenaries and terrorists? And what kind of conversation can a man who prefers hunting for perfect three-minute pop songs and tubes of beer have with devotees of fasting and ferocity? Sarajevo. Jerusalem. Kabul. Belfast. Kosovo. Gaza. Basra. New York City. Every place where recent history advertises the stubbornness, intolerance, bloodlust, and cowardice that sully our collective record, there the intrepid Andrew Mueller goes, skidding around the globe from failed state to ravaged war zone to desolate no-man’s-land to try to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace. En route, he meets various influential panjandrums (Al Gore, Gerry Adams, Bono, Paddy Ashdown), any number of assorted warlords and revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of peacemakers and do-gooders. He also manages to get shot at, locked up, and taken on a tour by one of the world’s most infamous terrorist organizations. It’s like a Bond film with much, much less sex, and might appear for that and other reasons to be substantially a story of disappointment. Yet it’s a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself.

I Wouldn't Start from Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong

History

Catapult

Andrew Mueller is Australian by birth, a Londoner by choice, a wanderer by nature, and a journalist by profession. Unable to decide between being a rock critic, travel writer, or foreign correspondent, he hit upon the novel, if time-consuming, solution of trying to be all three at once. In Rock and Hard Places, published originally in the U.K. in 1999, now re-envisioned and updated and available for the first time in the United States, he travels to Lebanon with the Prodigy, comes to America with Radiohead, and goes all over the place with U2. He ventures to Bosnia Herzegovina with an aid convoy in the middle of the war, sees Def Leppard play in a cave in Morocco, and attempts to ask the Taliban not only what they think they’re up to, but who they fancy for the World Cup. He flings himself head first down the Cresta Run, sits in Stalin’s armchair, chases ambulances through Moscow, chases some kind of lost tribe in India, wakes up at least once in a park in Reykjavik, and strongly advises avoiding the seafood salad in Sapporo Airport. He’s funny. Occasionally he makes a point.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

With considerable skill, Mueller skids around the globe from failed state to ravaged warzone to desolate no-man's-land, from Beirut to Basra via Belfast and Bihac to try to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace, why so much that can go wrong does go wrong, over and over again, and how and why some conflicts suddenly, quietly, inexplicably seem to find themselves solved. It's a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself. And it is a notably entertaining and eye-opening tour of the world's moral basements in the vein of Holidays in Hell or Emergency Sex.

I Wouldn't Start from Here

Travel

Travel Writing

Portobello

Foruli Limited

"Rock journalism," Frank Zappa once harrumphed, "is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Whatever, Frank. 'It's Too Late To Die Young Now' is both a memoir and a defence of rock journalism - a field mythologised and derided like few others. With good reason, according to Andrew Mueller - and he would know. Mueller began writing for the Australian street press while still in his teens, and by his early twenties was working for the legendary UK music weekly 'Melody Maker'. In a matter of a few years he went from a childhood bedroom dominated by a poster of Robert Smith to The Cure's tour bus. Nobody knew it at the time, but the period in which Mueller got to be a rock journalist - the late '80s to mid '90s, dominated by grunge and the Britpop response to it - turned out to be something of a valedictory hurrah for the music press. 'It's Too Late To Die Young Now' is basically 'Almost Famous' on a much lower budget, a heartfelt and hilarious eulogy to a life that seems even less probable now than it did at the time.

It's Too Late to Die Young Now: Misadventures in Rock And Roll

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Books by Mueller, Andrew