View From A Hill and The City Is Ablaze!

View From A Hill is a mind-blowing rollercoaster ride of a rock memoir. Moving and hilarious by turns, you’re not going to be able to put this thing down.

View From A Hill tells the story of Mark Burgess, a child of 1970s Manchester whose life was changed forever following an encounter with The Sex Pistols on Christmas Day 1977. Buying a £20 bass guitar and founding a punk band of his own, he soon found himself in The Chameleons, a band catapulted to the forefront of the post-punk scene when legendary broadcaster John Peel awarded them a session. As well as charting The Chameleons’ development – and the band’s cruel treatment at the hands of a corrupt, self-serving music industry – Mark places his musical exploits into the wider context of his life. Amidst intrigue in the Middle East, drugs, spirituality, and unexplained phenomena there are a host of music industry anecdotes that will make your jaw drop.

The City Is Ablaze! reads like a musical history of the late eighties and early nineties, a history that could only be obtained by surfing the sliproads, sneaking backstage at a thousand shows, sleeping on strangers’ floors and living to type up the tales of the sounds that defined an era.

“It’s a cacophony of voices. It’s the most moving music-related thing I’ve read since Kristin Hersh’s memoir…” Scott Creney, Collapse Board