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Previously unpublished: Rejected book review of Stone Free by Andrew Loog Oldham

Mar 5th, 2013

A couple of months back I was commissioned to review Andrew Loog Oldham’s latest book Stone Free for a website, but my copy was rejected on the basis of my use of  “criticism”; they prefer to keep things – in their words – “upbeat”.

I like the commissioner, think the site is good and had no problem with the rejection, but thought it may be of interest, so here it is:

Print

“I have little use for the past and do not give it much thought.”

Now that is rich.

One anticipates and has often applauded bare-faced sauce from the music business maverick turned self-chronicler Andrew Loog Oldham, author of Stoned (384 densely-packed pages of reflection on life from birth in 1944 to the point of managing the Rolling Stones in 1963, with “drug-cuts” into the 70s and 80s), 2Stoned (480 pages on his four-year stewardship of same) and a “fictionalised biography” of Abba (on which we need not dwell).

When this confession – even if it is soon qualified – arrives 10 chapters and 140 pages in to Oldham’s new digital-only tome Stone Free, it produces a whoop not of glee but of derision.

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