BOOK REVIEW: Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025

Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Robin Ince, out now, Macmillan, £20.

The comedian Robin Ince was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 52. Suddenly, everything – his lifelong burble of anxiety, self-criticism, social discomfort and ‘mad’ racing thoughts – made sense. A burden had been lifted. It’s OK to feel that way. It’s normal, whatever ‘normal’ is.

A wise, witty, thoughtful, comforting and compassionate book, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity traces the author’s own story in sensitive tandem with a panoply of neurodiverse interviewees and academic research.

Ince never generalises, but common themes include childhood trauma, PTSD, bullying, a searing sense of justice and – more light-heartedly, but it’s all connected – a voracious passion for Doctor Who, horror films and accumulating a vast mountain of knowledge and ‘stuff’.

In his introduction, Ince declares (not at all seriously) that he will cure the reader of their anxiety. It’s not a self-help book, he just hopes it helps. It does. It’s a valuable piece of work.

BOOK REVIEW: Bowie Odyssey 75 by Simon Goodard

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025.

Bowie Odyssey 75, Simon Goddard, out now, Omnibus Press, £17.99

In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult.

A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself).

This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade.

For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting and beautifully written piece of expressionistic docu-fiction all told in the propulsive present tense. Goddard places us inside Bowie’s addled mind while exploring – in meticulously researched and sometimes harrowing detail – thematic parallels with certain key events of 1975.

Nestling amid this swirling rotten funk of fame, fascism, murder, drugs, madness, mass unemployment and rampant Rollermania are the book’s other main characters: Bowie’s long-suffering and LOUD wife Angie; his agonisingly lonely and worried mother Peggy; nascent punk Svengali and shameless opportunist Malcolm McLaren; Tory leader Margaret Thatcher marching towards her everlasting reign of terror; Hitler-obsessed serial killer Patrick Mackay; and the leather mask-wearing ‘Cambridge Rapist’ Peter Samuel Cook.

Goddard ties these strands together to conjure up a vivid hellscape in which Bowie created his latest blurred lines persona, the fascistic, foppish Thin White Duke, while not really having to act at all in the role of a burned-out alabaster alien in Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.

If that all sounds rather dark, well yes, it is, but it’s often very funny in an unflinching tragicomic way. A deadly serious, dirt-encrusted pop culture farce. Goddard is an irreverent yet fundamentally empathetic socio-political historian and storyteller. He’s a Bowie fan who isn’t blind to his subject’s faults, but who can also wax rapturously, and perceptively, about his art (Bowie somehow made one of his greatest albums, Station to Station, in 1975). Hyperbole be damned, Goddard’s unfolding odyssey is an idiosyncratic masterpiece.

LIVE REVIEW: Wrest

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Wrest

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

**

Edinburgh's Wrest are a genuinely independent grass-roots success story. They're unsigned, they've self-released three albums, they run their own promotions company, and they recently played a sold-out headline show at the Barrowlands.

That's all quite impressive, but Wrest are also a risk-averse MOR guitar band who needn't ever worry about being crushed under the weight of their own inventiveness. Blatantly indebted to the sensitive anthem-sized likes of Snow Patrol, Coldplay, U2 and Frightened Rabbit, they have no ideas or personality of their own. The paucity of ambition is bewildering.

Singer-songwriter Stewart Douglas has forensically studied those bands and worked out the basic formula for writing A Big Emotional Anthem, which wouldn't really matter if he had at least one gem in his arsenal to match the undeniable phones-aloft triumph of, say, Chasing Cars or Yellow. But he hasn't.

Every mid-paced song sounds exactly the same – a generic grey mass of two or three strummed chords, simple lead guitar lines, pulsing With or Without You bass, derivative vocal melodies and 'soaring' arrangements designed to surge dramatically at just the right moment. It's all so predictable.

Whereas Frightened Rabbit once used this well-worn template to express complex feelings in a powerfully honest way, Wrest deal in mere Hallmark platitudes. Douglas is constantly urging us to "keep going" in the face of adversity etc. Well-meaning sentiments, but hardly useful in the grand challenging scheme of things.

Performance-wise they're just four nondescript – and probably very nice - men trudging through the motions, their ordinariness emphasised by the surrounding beauty of this old Glasgow venue (which wasn't sold out).

A triumph of marketing over artistic merit, the whole thing - the whole 'project' - feels more like a functional business plan than a heartfelt musical endeavour.