The Book of Dave

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The Book of Dave tells the story of an angry and mentally ill London taxi driver named Dave Rudman, who writes and has printed on metal a book of his rantings against women and thoughts on custody rights for fathers. These stem from his anger with his ex-wife, Michelle, who he believes is unfairly keeping him from his son. Equally influential in Dave's book is The Knowledge—the intimate familiarity with the city of London required of its cabbies. The Book of Dave can be considered to be a parody of modern religion especially with regard to blind faith. For example, the "Hamsters", the inhabitants of the island of Ham (actually the higher, unflooded part of Hampstead Heath), believe that certain verses out of the book are sacred "hymns", where in fact they are just excerpts from The Knowledge. Additionally, aspects of Dave's life are ritualised into legal requirements: such as "changeover", the act of custodial exchange of children, and parents being forced to live apart even though they would be happy living together. "This challenges the assumption of whether people should follow something just because it is written in an old book." — Will Self

I went to a Northern Soul reunion with Dave in the early 90s and I gave him a suit to wear. It was a beautiful three piece suit made from a heavyweight dark rich grey material called Thornproof, cut in a Victorian style. For some reason I'd had two made, both identical so I gave one to Dave as a gift. He loved it, it fitted him like a glove, he looked amazing. Anyway, I was in this Soul club and there were a lot of leading lights of the Northern Soul scene there and suddenly there was a hush in the room and Dave Godin walked in looking amazing in this suit, and it was almost like a meeting of vampires and Dracula had just turned up!" (MICHAEL SOMERSET, SONGWRITER) In the early 60s Dave's Church Road home was more of a music Mecca than in the Soul days because all these aspiring blues groups knew that there was him and maybe a couple of others in the whole of London who had the records and they could go 'round and listen to stuff, transcribe it, record it, even buy the disc off Dave. So up to the Motown change over, a lot of bluesy types went 'round there. Motown was the pop end of Soul but Dave was obviously a very shrewd operator and apart from genuinely liking Motown I think he also realised that blues was going nowhere commercially and when Dave heard these Motown records he was like people in the 70s when they first heard Punk he was so excited by them." (KEITH RYLATT)... I signed up here to review some good books, and in the process found the Dave books come up. They're awful. Not the quality of the book, but the content, the actual substance. We get to know Dave in ways we didn't want to, and it doesn't improve our opinion of him. The Kinks get a crap bath as well, stories that may or may not be true. I remember on an EP many years ago, a live concert, Ray referring to his 'delectable brother'.Dave buries the book, which is discovered centuries later and used as the sacred text for a dogmatic, cruel, and misogynistic religion that takes hold in the remnants of southern England and London following catastrophic flooding. The future portions of the novel are set from 523 AD (dating from the purported discovery of the book). The island in the novel is inspired by the hilltop town of Hampstead in London and its famous parkland Hampstead Heath. In the book, Self describes a future England which has been inundated with rising seas, leaving Hampstead as the only remaining part of London. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. The geography of the island, illustrated in a map at the start of the book, bears close resemblance to the modern areas of Hampstead which inspired it. [5] Contemporary narrative [ edit ]

I also appreciated Dave Davies' candid comments about the man whom he loves dearly...yet who has used and abused him all his life...his genius older brother Ray Davies It is their tortuous relationship that is at the heart of KINK. From what Dave Davies says...its a bonafide miracle that he and his brother were able to stay together (as a band) for as long as they did..it also gives fascinating insight into why The Kinks eventually broke up...never to reunite again (at least as of this writing). Thumbnail sketches of the brothers at the heart of the Kinks habitually paint Ray, the elder, as the more complex and deep-feeling character, and Dave as flamboyant, more forthcoming and into UFOs. A lifelong square peg, the younger Davies is every bit as hard to pigeonhole as his sibling, swinging between the weary defence of his input to the band – always the subject of contention between Team Ray and Team Dave – and low self-esteem. Kinks fans will be familiar with the retelling of the band’s serpentine ups and downs, both musical and financial, how a ban on touring the US in the late 60s resulted in the Kinks turning more parochial and producing social commentary and albums such as The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, an Englishness that fed into punk and Britpop. Less familiar are the latterday updates, like Davies’s reunion with his teenage flame and their daughter, 30 years down the line. The two young lovers were forcibly separated by their parents; the loss of Sue and baby Tracey haunts Davies throughout his life.I used to go to all the 'do's' where Dave used to rent a room above a pub and you'd get The Four Tops performing!" recalls Graham Moss. "There would be a reception for society members and whenever groups and singers came over to play there'd be a meet....

The 1990s saw Dave's professional return to Soul music with the critically acclaimed and best selling CD compilations, 'DAVE GODIN'S DEEP SOUL TREASURES' for the Kent/Ace label. The final release compiled and released shortly before his death. I don’t know how this autobiography doesn’t have a 5 star rating. It took me quite the while to read, but only because I was fighting off a book slump. Writing in The Guardian in 2007, the author said he was inspired to write the book after having read The Bible Unearthed, a text that claims that archaeological discoveries imply that large elements of the Old Testament have no basis in historical reality whatsoever. [4] He writes that he intended to suggest imaginatively the notion he received from Finkelstein and Silberman's book, namely that revealed religion is a necessary function of state formation, and that the content of this or that holy book is irrelevant, compared to what people make of it. [4] At the same time, reports of increased raisings of the Thames Barrier had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis. [4] It's depressing. Much of the Kinks music is sad, downer stuff, but the sheer beauty of it redeemed it every time. More unsettling to some readers was the violence in Self's book. Why did he include such graphic scenes of torture? In the replica London constructed somewhere north of Nottingham, the cityscape is dominated by a giant wheel that is an engine of torment on which heretics are broken. A mother is executed at Marble Arch while her children look on. The questioner evidently found the precision of these episodes disturbing. It was all taken, explained the author, direct from accounts of what happened at Tyburn in Elizabethan London.On the isolated island of Ham, a tiny community ekes out an existence from the land, assisted by semi-intelligent pig-like creatures known as 'motos' that are unique to the island. The community lives according to the severely enforced religion of the country known as "Ing" (i.e. England) whereby men and women lead separate lives but share childcare in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Dave, which is regarded as a sacred text, but which is evidently the book written by Dave Rudman and buried in a Hampstead garden some two thousand years earlier. A young male 'Hamster', Symun Devush, explores a forbidden area of the island and emerges claiming that he has discovered a second Book of Dave that repudiates the tenets of the first. Although Symun's revelations are popular, and he is lauded throughout the country as a prophet, religious authorities from the reconstructed city of New London send a deposition that arrests Symun on a charge of heresy (or 'flying') and transports him to New London, where he is physically and mentally broken, his tongue torn out, and returned to live in isolation on the desolate outcrop of land known as Nimar, not far from Ham. I thought the biography would take about six months to research and complete until I discovered how many facets there was to Dave Godin. Over six years later, here we are!

Raised in a household short on cash but big on maternal love, Grohl believes he probably had ADHD, such was his restlessness and inability to turn his natural curiosity into good grades. While his mother, whom he adores, encouraged him to seize the day, Grohl’s divorced father disowned him when he dropped out of school to join punk band Scream, playing venues Grohl wasn’t legally allowed to enter because of his age (he had lied to get the gig).Davies writes at length about his deep interest in the esoteric, an enthusiasm for the unexplained that dovetails into a penchant for the occult. His nervous breakdown in the early 70s makes for painful but cautionary reading. In 1982, there was an encounter with what he calls “the Intelligences” – mysterious beings with whom he enters into “telepathic exchange”.