I'm Not with the Band

A roller-coaster memoir, which also works as a paean to a lost era, when pop (and pop journalism) was flush with cash and kudos * Sunday Times (Music Book of the Year) *Great journalism, and also written with a clear, unsentimental eye * The Times *Patterson hilariously recounts life on Britain’s Brightest Pop Magazine ™. Funny, anecdote-packed, nostalgic but also very touching * The Pool *Celebratory and elegiac, I’m Not with the Band documents the last three and half decades in pop and gives an honest account of an exhilarating and grueling life. Top read. * Guardian *

Sylvia Patterson is one of pop journalism’s best-known voices. Born in Perth, Scotland, she moved to London in 1986, aged twenty, to join Smash Hits as Staff Writer, going on to freelance for NME, The Face, Glamour, Q, Sunday Times and many other publications across the UK and US. Her first memoir, I’m Not With the Band (2016), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Penderyn Music Book Prize, the NME Awards Book of the Year and won BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale’s Book of the Year.