Acknowledgements

William:

Thanks to my wife, Bernadette, for her infinite love and patience, and to my wee sister, Linda, and the rest of my family for a lifetime of adventures.

Thanks to David McBride and Ben Thompson for making the book happen.

And thanks to everyone else I know for being in my life – you know who you are.

Jim:

The drink and drugs is the old Jim – these days I spend my time walking around the cliff-tops of Devon with my partner, Rachel Conti, without whom I’m not sure where I’d be…

Ben:

Thanks first (because this is the positioning she insisted on) to the light of my life, Vicki Duffey, for telling me to get off my arse and do some real work for once when everyone else was being very patient about how late this book was getting. Thanks also to William Reid and Jim Reid for being a joy to collaborate with; to David McBride for being the most helpful band or artist manager I have ever experienced and for making the considerable mental effort needed to get his head round the arcane analogue complexities of the proofing process; to Lee Brackstone for picking me for the job in the first place and keeping the faith when the going got tough; to Keith Cameron for not pulling Caledonian rank in the course of a deft and gracious copy edit; to the White Rabbit/Orion Books A-team of Georgia Goodall, Sophie Nevrkla, Natalie Dawkins and Tom Noble for being entirely on the ball; to Kasimiira Kontio for managing the media scrum in a much less obtrusive manner than Wayne Barnes would; to Lesley Thorne for injecting a note of realism into the production schedule; to Richard King and Wesley Stace for being quick and meticulous first readers; to Jon Savage, Sean O’Hagan and Matt Thorne for being supportive shadows in the gloaming; to Steve Underwood of the excellent Pressing Matters record shop in Hastings for picking me up those hard to find Munki singles at competitive prices; and, last but not least, to Bernadette Reid for her sterling work as a volunteer picture editor, as well as tireless chronology checking and unravelling of gnomic utterance, in which last endeavour she supplied my favourite editorial note: ‘I don’t understand why William would have said this… Is it possible he and Jim had just had an argument?’