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Dance Prone
'A raw and raging celebration of music . . . astounding.' Megan Bradbury
'Funny, filthy, erudite, and rude.' Carl Shuker
'A magnificent novel.' Alan McMonagle
During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band’s four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in transcendence through the act of art.
With decades passed and compelled by his wife’s failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.
Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk infused performance, the road and the players’ relationship to violence, hate and peace.
Set during both the post-punk period and the present day, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction.
'Funny, filthy, erudite, and rude.' Carl Shuker
'A magnificent novel.' Alan McMonagle
During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band’s four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in transcendence through the act of art.
With decades passed and compelled by his wife’s failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.
Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk infused performance, the road and the players’ relationship to violence, hate and peace.
Set during both the post-punk period and the present day, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
Paperback
Published July 8, 2021
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About the author
David Coventry
6 books7 followersDavid Coventry was awarded the Hubert Church Award for Fiction in 2016 at the New Zealand Book Awards. A graduate of the IIML, his novel The Invisible Mile (2015) re-imagines the gruelling 1928 Tour de France. The novel is Published in New Zealand by Victoria University Press, in the UK and Commonwealth (ex Can) by Picador UK, and the USA and Canada by Europa Editions (June 2017). Translations are to be released in Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish and German.
The Invisible Mile was shortlisted in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was in the NZ top Ten for over a year.
The Invisible Mile was shortlisted in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was in the NZ top Ten for over a year.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 9, 2020
Hats off to David Coventry for this visceral, poetic voyage through a fictionalised version of the post-hardcore US music scene of the 1980s, and it's ramifications in the lives and memories of a clique of vivid characters.
The story mainly concerns punk band Neus Bauen's sputtering tour through the American midwest and southwest in 1985, tapping an underground network for audiences, accommodation and support, the tour's marginal economics yielding moments of intense stage performance. On another level there is a whodunnit mystery about various sexual assaults and a self-harm incident, unresolved events that play down through the years to 2020, becoming a what-to-do-about-it along the way.
Onto this narrative armature the novel hangs various themes, including the personal-political ideologies of post-punk culture, its alignment with avant-garde art, the lure of theoretical cults, the coded languages of subcultural networks, and - perhaps most importantly - the nature of relationships within a music group and its circles of supporters and rivals. It's also a portrait of a particular musical generation. This cohort has been covered in non-fiction books such as Michael Azerrad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life", but it was certainly past time for somebody to use it as a fictional setting. (Maybe somebody has already - and I've missed it.) It's not always flattering. The book captures something of how youth culture can confuse hedonism and abuse. The sometimes amoral edge of the art scene is also exposed. But there is an affection and honesty here that does justice to a time and place.
Some reviewers have made much of Coventry's stylistic debt to Don DeLillo. The surface of the prose is certainly similar. But it's a pleasure to read and fits much better, I feel, than in his first novel 'The Invisible Mile'. Perhaps the widescreen sophistication of this type of writing is more apt for an underground music scene that was often highly literate and cosmopolitan, than a cycle race. One also picks up interesting echoes of other American writers: Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and others. A cool book.
The story mainly concerns punk band Neus Bauen's sputtering tour through the American midwest and southwest in 1985, tapping an underground network for audiences, accommodation and support, the tour's marginal economics yielding moments of intense stage performance. On another level there is a whodunnit mystery about various sexual assaults and a self-harm incident, unresolved events that play down through the years to 2020, becoming a what-to-do-about-it along the way.
Onto this narrative armature the novel hangs various themes, including the personal-political ideologies of post-punk culture, its alignment with avant-garde art, the lure of theoretical cults, the coded languages of subcultural networks, and - perhaps most importantly - the nature of relationships within a music group and its circles of supporters and rivals. It's also a portrait of a particular musical generation. This cohort has been covered in non-fiction books such as Michael Azerrad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life", but it was certainly past time for somebody to use it as a fictional setting. (Maybe somebody has already - and I've missed it.) It's not always flattering. The book captures something of how youth culture can confuse hedonism and abuse. The sometimes amoral edge of the art scene is also exposed. But there is an affection and honesty here that does justice to a time and place.
Some reviewers have made much of Coventry's stylistic debt to Don DeLillo. The surface of the prose is certainly similar. But it's a pleasure to read and fits much better, I feel, than in his first novel 'The Invisible Mile'. Perhaps the widescreen sophistication of this type of writing is more apt for an underground music scene that was often highly literate and cosmopolitan, than a cycle race. One also picks up interesting echoes of other American writers: Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and others. A cool book.
May 6, 2020
Dance Prone is unlike anything I’ve read before. The novel focuses on an indie band called Neus Bauen. Half of the book focuses on the traumatic events that happened to two members of the band in the 80s. The second half takes place in 2019 and focuses on the repercussions of this trauma, as the members of the group reflect on the events which have ultimately shaped their lives.
The prose was very fluid but often vague. Events blurred into one another, setting the scene of a time during which Conrad – our protagonist – was almost constantly drunk and drugged as well dealing with some difficult realities.
This is an interesting way to stage the novel and, whilst no doubt it was meant to reflect Conrad’s addled state of mind, it was perhaps not the best narrative choice. It requires you to focus all your energy just to follow the narrative, which reads like snippets of memories constantly blurring into one another.
The novel didn’t really delve into the backstory of many characters and at the end I still didn’t have a sense of who many of them ‘were’. Everything felt very abstract, from the characters to the places they went. It was almost like the author got so caught up in creating prose that was colourful and flowing that it actually lacked any kind of detail at all. It was hard to really ‘get into’ the story.
Perhaps this book would be more ideal for someone who was more familiar to the 80s music ‘scene’ as I often felt at times like I was exploring an alien world which was only half-formed.
That being said there were some interesting characters (which had the potential to be explored further). This novel also explored some really dark and difficult themes which it handled well. I was sufficiently intrigued by the events that happened in the 80s that I kept reading to the end, and I liked Conrad as our narrator. There is a real complexity to his character and you can feel the torment, anger and hurt that rages inside him all the way through this novel.
I received an ARC from NetGalley in an exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Picador for the opportunity to read and review this book.
The prose was very fluid but often vague. Events blurred into one another, setting the scene of a time during which Conrad – our protagonist – was almost constantly drunk and drugged as well dealing with some difficult realities.
This is an interesting way to stage the novel and, whilst no doubt it was meant to reflect Conrad’s addled state of mind, it was perhaps not the best narrative choice. It requires you to focus all your energy just to follow the narrative, which reads like snippets of memories constantly blurring into one another.
The novel didn’t really delve into the backstory of many characters and at the end I still didn’t have a sense of who many of them ‘were’. Everything felt very abstract, from the characters to the places they went. It was almost like the author got so caught up in creating prose that was colourful and flowing that it actually lacked any kind of detail at all. It was hard to really ‘get into’ the story.
Perhaps this book would be more ideal for someone who was more familiar to the 80s music ‘scene’ as I often felt at times like I was exploring an alien world which was only half-formed.
That being said there were some interesting characters (which had the potential to be explored further). This novel also explored some really dark and difficult themes which it handled well. I was sufficiently intrigued by the events that happened in the 80s that I kept reading to the end, and I liked Conrad as our narrator. There is a real complexity to his character and you can feel the torment, anger and hurt that rages inside him all the way through this novel.
I received an ARC from NetGalley in an exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Picador for the opportunity to read and review this book.
November 24, 2021
The blurb puts it best - "DANCE PRONE is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal." For many who were around in the mid 1980's, immersed in the counter culture of hard-core post-punk, indie rock with its wildness and weirdness, there are going to be bells ringing, and maybe some uncomfortable recognition. It's ultimately a novel about trauma, delivered in a series of brutal, almost dance like moves, with events blurring, just as they would have for central character Conrad - who spends a lot of time drunk, drugged, struggling.
With half the story being about events in the 80's, the sexual assault and wounding by gunshot of two members of the band intertwined with current day 2019, focusing in the later timeline on repercussions, mostly done by way of reflection and consideration.
It's written in a fluid, rolling, rhythmic yet frequently discordant sort of a manner, reflecting that drunk, drugged viewpoint of, at the very least, Conrad. Protagonist, band member, victim who is pretty well out of it for the entire time that the band is touring, working the far edges of the music industry, reflecting the style of music in a lifestyle of risk, and little financial reward. Veering into poetic, almost stream of conscious style, it's hard not to feel some hat tips going on here to writers like Cormac McCathy and Jack Kerouac.
Having said that is, this didn't quite read like ON THE ROAD for more recent generations, and that might say a lot more about the age / reflections of this reader than it does about the book itself. The characters are complicated, multi-dimensional beings in a furry, fuzzy world. The act of reflection is sometimes illuminating, and at other times self-indulgent to the point of teeth endangering. There is obviously an attempt here to get inside musical thinking - and there's definitely something there in the fluidity of the style, and those rapid switches from musicality to discordance that felt like it was reflecting something about the indie rock scene. Or at least I think that's what's going on - whatever it is, is somewhere a little outside my descriptive ability.
There were times that I really loved DANCE PRONE and really thought I knew what was going on, was inside it's world, and then there were times, perhaps a little too reminiscent of too many 80's parties, where I felt like a complete outsider, no idea what everyone was talking about, missed which boat it was that we were all supposed to be disdainfully rejecting.
Definitely going to be a book that divides opinion, and it may even be one of those books that sits neatly in the generation divide or specifically within your own particular set of interests. Having said that, there are glimpses into the impacts of violence and abuse that were very moving. Perhaps it's a book for readers who are looking for something profoundly different.
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/revi...
With half the story being about events in the 80's, the sexual assault and wounding by gunshot of two members of the band intertwined with current day 2019, focusing in the later timeline on repercussions, mostly done by way of reflection and consideration.
It's written in a fluid, rolling, rhythmic yet frequently discordant sort of a manner, reflecting that drunk, drugged viewpoint of, at the very least, Conrad. Protagonist, band member, victim who is pretty well out of it for the entire time that the band is touring, working the far edges of the music industry, reflecting the style of music in a lifestyle of risk, and little financial reward. Veering into poetic, almost stream of conscious style, it's hard not to feel some hat tips going on here to writers like Cormac McCathy and Jack Kerouac.
Having said that is, this didn't quite read like ON THE ROAD for more recent generations, and that might say a lot more about the age / reflections of this reader than it does about the book itself. The characters are complicated, multi-dimensional beings in a furry, fuzzy world. The act of reflection is sometimes illuminating, and at other times self-indulgent to the point of teeth endangering. There is obviously an attempt here to get inside musical thinking - and there's definitely something there in the fluidity of the style, and those rapid switches from musicality to discordance that felt like it was reflecting something about the indie rock scene. Or at least I think that's what's going on - whatever it is, is somewhere a little outside my descriptive ability.
There were times that I really loved DANCE PRONE and really thought I knew what was going on, was inside it's world, and then there were times, perhaps a little too reminiscent of too many 80's parties, where I felt like a complete outsider, no idea what everyone was talking about, missed which boat it was that we were all supposed to be disdainfully rejecting.
Definitely going to be a book that divides opinion, and it may even be one of those books that sits neatly in the generation divide or specifically within your own particular set of interests. Having said that, there are glimpses into the impacts of violence and abuse that were very moving. Perhaps it's a book for readers who are looking for something profoundly different.
https://www.austcrimefiction.org/revi...
March 7, 2021
Holy shit, what an amazing, brutal, poetic slam dance this book is. So many characters all held together at the edge of the stage, clues about each emerging, each fragment darker and sadder than the image before. Twists seeping through pores of sweat and hate. Recommended for fans of Minutemen.
May 10, 2020
Dance Prone is a novel about trauma, violence, and music, set during the 80s hardcore punk scene and in the present day. Neus Bauen are a post-punk band touring America, with frenzy and drink and drug fuelled gigs and hours in their tour bus. When one of their members is sexually assaulted and another suffers a gunshot wound, things start to alter for the band. And as the decades pass, the band members grow older, but are still haunted by trauma and by the violence that happened during their time on the road and subsequently.
The novel is written in a fluid style that reflect the protagonist's state of mind, with memory loss due to trauma, and the narrative moves between 1985 and the present day. This makes it often quite confusing to read, with characters not always distinct from each other, or not really described so they just become names to forget. Maybe this adds to the effect of the novel and the haziness surrounding some of the events, but it makes for a tough reading experience, taking a long time to even work out the main characters and their relationships. The dark subject matter provides a reflection on music scenes, violence, and the way that these scenes are reconstructed in memory, but this and the style make it quite unrelenting reading material.
For fans of books about fictional bands, this one brings depth and complication, looking at the trauma lurking behind the vision of a small band in a classic music scene. However, it had the issue that some novels about specific scenes or cultural moments do where they feel like an onslaught of characters, moments, and references that can be difficult to follow.
The novel is written in a fluid style that reflect the protagonist's state of mind, with memory loss due to trauma, and the narrative moves between 1985 and the present day. This makes it often quite confusing to read, with characters not always distinct from each other, or not really described so they just become names to forget. Maybe this adds to the effect of the novel and the haziness surrounding some of the events, but it makes for a tough reading experience, taking a long time to even work out the main characters and their relationships. The dark subject matter provides a reflection on music scenes, violence, and the way that these scenes are reconstructed in memory, but this and the style make it quite unrelenting reading material.
For fans of books about fictional bands, this one brings depth and complication, looking at the trauma lurking behind the vision of a small band in a classic music scene. However, it had the issue that some novels about specific scenes or cultural moments do where they feel like an onslaught of characters, moments, and references that can be difficult to follow.
January 31, 2022
I couldn’t read it. It stressed me out.
April 25, 2022
Deep dark punk. Fucken good
February 7, 2021
Here's a great review of this book by Victor Billot. Like him, I also “left the gig conflicted, and with ringing ears”. Only I left with a pass out, half way through.
https://landfallreview.com/death-and-weirdness-in-the-surfing-zone
https://landfallreview.com/death-and-weirdness-in-the-surfing-zone
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews