In telling the personal story of a world-leading agent, promoter, manager and songwriter, Adventures in Wonderland provides the most brilliant insights ever into the fascinating, often exhilarating – and sometimes emotionally devastating – world of contemporary music at the very highest level.
Paul Charles has lived the life, loved the music, dreamt the dreams, and been manager and confidante to some of the world’s biggest – and most artistically credible – artists and songwriters. In Adventures in Wonderland, he writes about his encounters with The Beatles, The Kinks, Robert Plant, Van Morrison, The Rolling Stones, Carly Simon, The Police, U2, The Waterboys, Shakespeare’s Sister – and dozens more legendary artists, and his 30-year involvement in the Glastonbury Festival. But at the heart of the wonderful trip described in Adventures in Wonderland is an overpowering love – and a deep understanding – of music and how it excites, obsesses and heals us. And sometimes drives us completely wild, doing and experiencing things we had never, ever imagined.
ISBN 9780957611498
'She came in like a shadow. She slid and bore herself into my eye, between my eyelids which blinked against the dust.' She is Maud Gonne, the muse of writer William Butler Yeats. Yeats here returns as a ghost, after having been buried in France in 1939 in the cemetery of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, to be returned to Ireland a decade later.
He emerges from his grave to recount his thwarted love with Maud, a story that merges with that of the independence movement of Ireland, of which they were both emblematic actors. Yeats' ghost has suddenly arisen because diplomatic documents long kept secret have resurfaced, casting doubt on the contents of the coffin brought back into Ireland for a state funeral. Where did the poet's body go? Does he still hover, as he wrote, 'somewhere above the clouds'? What remains of our loves and our deaths, if not their poetry? Besserie's exciting new novel follows on from Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (Le Tiers Temps), translated by Cliona Ni Riordain.
In Maylis Besserie's second novel, she turns her attention from Samuel Beckett to another iconic Irish writer, W. B. Yeats.
The connection between France in Ireland is once again explored in the context of art, culture and the days at the end of life.