'The book is not just a history of DSS but of the Dublin music scene at the time: participants, musicians come and go, sometimes returning…A splendid read, there are some excellent stories throughout the book: touring Europe, touring with a horsebox, lysergic experiences, mushrooms and a comeuppance for the Edgar Broughton Band… I don’t want to say too much as I recommend reading this yourselves if you don’t know the story and let’s face it, very few do. DSS were hardly a name band, though they have attracted some well-known fans... Illustrated throughout with drawings from the band and photographs at various stages of their ‘career’. Love the phonofiddle.
'Adrian Whittaker has done the band proud, letting them speak in their voices, remembering events slightly differently from each other. ‘There are no facts, only versions’ (of each other) as it says at the book’s beginning. I typed this up having just read the opening again and added the words ‘of each other’. Thus is memory changed. Read and enjoy.'
Hubert Rawlinson, The Afterword
'Heroic retrievals, digging and sifting the mists of memory, reveal the secret history of a Dublin band finding themselves, and the words and sounds of that city's emerging subterranean moment.'
Iain Sinclair, writer, psychogeographer and Dublin contemporary of the Strangelies.
'Adrian Whittaker has hacked through the undergrowth and rediscovered a forgotten wonderland of the weird folk underground. Rich in colourful half-memories and eccentric detail, this telling playfully reanimates a dormant British/Irish counterculture, with its dreams of the curiously curious and the abnormally odd.'
Rob Young, The Wire and author of Electric Eden.
'Adrian Whittaker has done the band proud, letting them speak in their voices, remembering events slightly differently from each other. ‘There are no facts, only versions’ (of each other) as it says at the book’s beginning. I typed this up having just read the opening again and added the words ‘of each other’. Thus is memory changed. Read and enjoy.'
Hubert Rawlinson, The Afterword
'Heroic retrievals, digging and sifting the mists of memory, reveal the secret history of a Dublin band finding themselves, and the words and sounds of that city's emerging subterranean moment.'
Iain Sinclair, writer, psychogeographer and Dublin contemporary of the Strangelies.
'Adrian Whittaker has hacked through the undergrowth and rediscovered a forgotten wonderland of the weird folk underground. Rich in colourful half-memories and eccentric detail, this telling playfully reanimates a dormant British/Irish counterculture, with its dreams of the curiously curious and the abnormally odd.'
Rob Young, The Wire and author of Electric Eden.
