Boys Keep Swinging: A Memoir

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He seized opportunity by the balls and made things happen, dancing on bartops to make some extra cash and struggling to fucking do something—to leave his mark on the world while grappling with an almost crippling self-loathing. Following a misfit boy’s development into a dazzling rock star, Boys Keep Swinging is a raucously entertaining memoir that will be an inspiration to anyone with determination and a dream. I’d watch them get ready for a school dance, tucking and untucking the fronts of their shirts, trying their best to mimic the styles they saw on MTV, which was beamed into our home courtesy of the new miracle of cable. And [Shears] is just as clever a narrator as he is a lyricist, keenly sketching the gay bars and nightclubs that fostered the electroclash scene in which the band spawned.

In the street life and lights of late 90s New York City, Shears gradually found a sense of belonging and freedom, forming the incredible Scissor Sisters and going on to sell out venues worldwide. Its amazing how what you see presented in the media is far from the reality of the Mental and Physical challenges being faced by Jake and those around him. Fast forward to February and March of 2020 when I watched The Masked Singer UK and fell in love with a flamboyant unicorn prancing on the stage. NetGalley and Atria Books provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Then, at the age of 25, in 1972 he wrote a song about a dead skunk and leapt from critic's darling to popular success, since then he's recorded twenty-seven albums, won a Grammy Award and sold-out the London Palladium. Tales of music and the music industry have always fascinated me and this book is one of the best musician autobiographies I've ever read. Jake Shears lays bare his youthful angst, the misfit years, family and school life and his path to pop stardom and being taken under the nurturing wing of Sir Elton John. It sat on a square piece of land surrounded by orange groves and a cotton field, which was sometimes also a watermelon patch.

Other kids would scrawl out a couple mangled sentences and I would keep adding on to mine, stretching the narrative into something much longer than I had even expected. Relentless hard work and self-promotion paid off with a record deal and enormous success in England, where the band’s self-titled debut became the best-selling album of 2004. I had to lie flat, with my face propped up in my hands as he explained to me concepts that seemed abstract, like how an instrument wasn’t just something that made music. Eventually, Shears moved to New York and studied fiction writing at the New School, picking up gigs as a go-go dancer at clubs and writing for the fashionably hip Paper magazine. She had long black hair and smoked as she cut, a cigarette clamped between her lips while I sucked on my binky.In 1943, the Rosemead airport, east of Los Angeles, was the perfect spot to get a job, small but active enough where he could be close to the planes and begin learning how to fly. The first half of the book was an interesting slice-of-life experience, describing Jason's upbringing in what was an uncertain time for gay people: the outbreak of AIDS, the social stigma of your sexual orientation being "abnormal. For some reason, I find musicians more interesting than actors, and have read a fair number of memoirs by artists I know peripherally: Jewel, Keith Richards, Posh Spice.

It’s an incredible feeling, when people you’ve never met before are thrilled to just see you; when you walk into a party or stroll down the street and they just want to talk to you and hug you.

He was always on the outskirts, never the in-crowd, and his entire life is filled with colorful people who make us want to be friends with them, too. This is an easy read that delves into a weird band, details the life of a gay kid growing up in an unforgiving world, and reminds us of some of the obscurest bops of the past 20 years. I’d been singing “Tomorrow” to the secretary in my dad’s office, to my friend’s mom, to anyone who would listen. They lined my bedroom shelves and did not bother to applaud my one-man shows, which I performed against the wooden footboard of my bed.