Days and Days: A Story About Sunderland’s Leatherface and the Ties That Bind
Chris MacDonald. ECW, $18.95 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-1-77041-670-3
Memoirist MacDonald (The Things I Came Here With) combines the history of the 1990s British punk band Leatherface with visceral meditations on how the group shaped his life. After hearing the band’s 1991 album, Mush, in his friend’s Toronto basement as a teen, the author felt he’d found “an answer in a world I’d yet to understand.” Years later, MacDonald’s infatuation with the music inspired a backpacking trip across the U.K. with a friend, where they heard the band play live and befriended its members. Later, MacDonald realized Leatherface had tapped into something deeper: a love of poetry and a desire ”to voice myself” in prose, so that “those expressions could be as resounding with others as [singer Frankie] Stubbs’ were with me.” The central narrative is interwoven—sometimes haphazardly—with the band’s biography, drawn from conversations with Leatherface members. MacDonald’s intimate and exuberant personal reflections are the highlight, particularly when he’s capturing the sense of youthful possibility that came with discovering the band and embarking on the backpacking trip (“Passersby saw only our beat-up eyes and dishevelled appearance. But they didn’t see... the two humans in the apex of life... bewildered by the power of our surroundings”). This buoyant ode to a favorite band charms. (Oct.)
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Reviewed on: 06/21/2024
Genre: Nonfiction