Too Weird for Ziggy

September 6, 2004
British music journalist Simmons has taken the years she spent interviewing rock's most outrageous personalities and compressed them into this lurid, engrossing collection of stories, gracefully linked like the incestuous world of rock itself. Alternating between first person and omniscient narration, she chronicles the transcendent weirdness of the music world. In one creepy story, "Pussy," a Blondie-esque pop goddess, disappears; years later, she's found in an East Village tenement surrounded by cabinets and sandwich bags stuffed with her own fingernails and excrement. The devastating effects of fame on personal identity are on display in almost every tale, from "Spitting Image," in which a megalomaniac rock star is ravaged by the kidnapping of his life-size look-alike puppet, to "Autograph," about an insolent rocker whose ex-girlfriend gives him a permanent comeuppance. The stories are at their best when Simmons depicts a scenario that doesn't read like a tabloid dream. In "I Kissed Willie Nelson's Nipple," a tough-living country star delivers a soliloquy so rich with hard-won wisdom that it trumps the too bizarre "Allergic to Kansas," in which a sexed-up lead singer mysteriously grows breasts. On these pages, fictional rock stars mingle with real ones, reminding readers, as with those ubiquitous Elvis sightings, that true rockers never die. They're just preparing for a comeback. Agent, Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books.

September 1, 2004
In her prose debut, British music journalist Simmons makes the mistake of many writers in assuming that rock stardom is inherently interesting. The problem is, celebrities so often play the role of greedy, oversexed cretins in real life that when it happens in fiction, the reader can easily guess the consequences. Simmons means well in that she means to make fun of her mostly despicable characters, which include a manager who stages the resurrection of his biggest client from the dead and a slimeball singer who sprouts breasts. But they are already so shallow that to cut them down to size reveals nothing if anything, it may endow them with more undeserved notoriety. Likewise, when Simmons tries to empathize with more decent industry specimens, she considers only their slick surfaces when she should be groping for their souls. In the end, country singer/songwriter LeeAnn Starmountain and aging pop tart Pussy are no deeper than their skeevier rockers in arms. Sadly, another Ziggy bites the dust; not recommended. Heather McCormack, Library Journal

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.