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Needle in the Groove
After years of playing in two-bit bands, Elliot gets his big chance - he meets a singer, a DJ and a drummer who seem to have everything. But just as their first dance record is climbing the charts, one of the band disappears.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
16 people are currently reading
691 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Noon
57 books865 followersJeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy.
He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion,
Vurt, was the hippest sci-fi novel to be published in Britain since the days of Michael Moorcock in the late sixties.
Like Moorcock, Noon is not preoccupied with technology per se, but incorporates technological developments into a world of magic and fantasy.
As a teenager, Noon was addicted to American comic heroes, and still turns to them for inspiration. He has said that music is more of an influence on his writing than novelists: he 'usually writes to music', and his record collection ranges from classical to drum'n'bass.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
January 16, 2015
Needle In The Groove is the sixth of Jeff Noon's books I've read, and while I admit that I think they're all good books, personally I think this is one of his best.
Story-wise it's a departure from his earlier works, seemingly moving away from the literary world(s) of the Vurt-verse, though there are moments within the narrative where I could see the conceptual connections between those earlier works and this one. It's a story about a band, about the music they make, and about how things go wrong when the rock and roll life is lived to excess. It's also a story about discovery and loss, and the plot had me hooked pretty much from start to finish.
As well as following the lives and adventures of the four main protagonists, the book also gives a potted history of the Manchester music scene, from skiffle through to modern techno and dance, and it's obvious from the way in which Noon tells this side of the story that he has a genuine passion for and love of music.
However, it's the way in which this novel is written that impressed me the most. Perhaps taking a touch of inspiration from music theory Noon has all but done away with punctuation and capitalisation here, breaking down the structure of every paragraph and sentence to short, beat-driven snippets of text more akin to song lyrics that prose. Throughout the book certain lines and paragraphs (verses?) are repeated, but in altered versions of their earlier selves. This is especially noticeable with the various remixes of the band's main hit, Scorched Out For Love, but it also appears more subtly in other places, offering up a sense of familiarity, of something half-remembered, almost like a dance tune heavy on samples might subtly remind you of the songs those samples are taken from.
I can see where some readers might find Noon's writing experiments in this novel gimmicky, or pretentious, and make no mistake it does require a certain level of pretentiousness to even consider trying something like this. The thing is, as far as I'm concerned he pulls it off so incredibly well and with so much style and panache that I can easily forgive him his pretensions.
This is a book to read if you have a love of music, especially the edgier side of music borne out of Manchester in the last half dozen decades. It's also a book to read if you want to see just how easily the rules of writing can be stretched and twisted without losing the story.
Story-wise it's a departure from his earlier works, seemingly moving away from the literary world(s) of the Vurt-verse, though there are moments within the narrative where I could see the conceptual connections between those earlier works and this one. It's a story about a band, about the music they make, and about how things go wrong when the rock and roll life is lived to excess. It's also a story about discovery and loss, and the plot had me hooked pretty much from start to finish.
As well as following the lives and adventures of the four main protagonists, the book also gives a potted history of the Manchester music scene, from skiffle through to modern techno and dance, and it's obvious from the way in which Noon tells this side of the story that he has a genuine passion for and love of music.
However, it's the way in which this novel is written that impressed me the most. Perhaps taking a touch of inspiration from music theory Noon has all but done away with punctuation and capitalisation here, breaking down the structure of every paragraph and sentence to short, beat-driven snippets of text more akin to song lyrics that prose. Throughout the book certain lines and paragraphs (verses?) are repeated, but in altered versions of their earlier selves. This is especially noticeable with the various remixes of the band's main hit, Scorched Out For Love, but it also appears more subtly in other places, offering up a sense of familiarity, of something half-remembered, almost like a dance tune heavy on samples might subtly remind you of the songs those samples are taken from.
I can see where some readers might find Noon's writing experiments in this novel gimmicky, or pretentious, and make no mistake it does require a certain level of pretentiousness to even consider trying something like this. The thing is, as far as I'm concerned he pulls it off so incredibly well and with so much style and panache that I can easily forgive him his pretensions.
This is a book to read if you have a love of music, especially the edgier side of music borne out of Manchester in the last half dozen decades. It's also a book to read if you want to see just how easily the rules of writing can be stretched and twisted without losing the story.
March 11, 2012
unlike anything / this book made me feel alive / there is a richness and a real spark of genius within its pages / I've found nothing like it before
Noon is as innovative as he is in-tune with the underlying essence of life / this book made me want to be even more alive than I am
part mystery / part eulogy / part miracle / part tragedy
read this and then enjoy being young and alive (yes, there are a couple of Morrissey references in there, and even more references to Manchester's music scene in general. Just really awesome by the end)
Noon is as innovative as he is in-tune with the underlying essence of life / this book made me want to be even more alive than I am
part mystery / part eulogy / part miracle / part tragedy
read this and then enjoy being young and alive (yes, there are a couple of Morrissey references in there, and even more references to Manchester's music scene in general. Just really awesome by the end)
September 23, 2019
I'm not entirely convinced that this book knew what it wanted to be. Very broadly speaking, texts that earn the handle "experimental" are those that tweak some stylistic convention attaining to realism in order to show A. the constructedness of all texts and-slash-or B. that realism is itself a genre laden with political and ideological codes (which typically present bourgeois values as normative). And Noon's Needle in the Groove is certainly experimental. The novel's dialogue is set off by em-dashes (a la Gaddis), all terminal punctuation marks have been replaced by slashes, effectively making the text read like an album's liner notes (an effect I think Noon was striving for), and there's almost no exposition to ground the reader to either setting or plot. So setting and plot are bourgeois affectations and quotation marks are bourgeois affectations and if you need periods then you're like totally squaresville man 'cause that's not what this book's about. But so then what is this book about? Here, bassist, Elliot Hall (oh, there aren't any capital letters either, so it's actually elliot hall), is recruited to join a band with drummer, 2spot, singer, donna, and dj, jody, who are making an album of what we're led to understand is a special, though unspecified, kind of new music that is being recorded on the sci-fi recording medium, liquid. These liquid recordings are about the size of a gumball and can have their recordings remixed just by shaking them (as in, shaking this gumball-sized globe produces a different track when that globe is replayed). Much of the first half of the novel is about the band laying down more and more versions of what they expect will be their hit single and then shaking the globe the last version was recorded on and then being not-quite-satisfied and then trying again. Woven throughout these sessions is the disclosure of elliot's cliched drug habit, from which he's recovering, and the band's various, and cliched, love triangles, and the revelations about ever-taciturn 2spot's musical lineage and cliched messed-up childhood (the angst from which childhood drives his creativity). From these brief scenelets the reader gathers that each musician desires contact with their musical heroes and inspirations, which contact is only possible to them, as it is to us, through the music they left for us. But then, without much preamble, these guys decide to freebase the liquid recording globes' liquid and transport themselves to the moments when their musical role models were in their primes. This, Noon's literalization of the (cliched) apothegm about music being a drug capable of transportation, is the most interesting part of the book, and it allows Noon to introduce competing timelines and hallucinatory visions and just basically confuse the reader's certainty of what's really happening in this novel and what isn't. This would seem to underline the novel's experimental cred in that these effects show the novel's (and the Novel's) artificiality and play against our bourgeois expectations about novels taking care of us and providing clear conclusions. The rest of the novel is an investigation into one of the band members' deaths, which investigation necessitates the use of the last remaining globes' liquid (a recording medium that has since been discontinued because, one gathers, many people began taking advantage of its hallucinogenic potential) and leads to a revelation that isn't especially revelatory. And I think I would be cool with all this if there was harmony between the novel's experimental features and its central theme. The thing that this kind of experimentation accomplishes is a sense of distance between the text and the reader; this text resists the reader's attempts to ignore its artificiality as well as get transported into the world of the text's construction. Which is fine, but then the novel is ABOUT art's capacity to transport us and function as a kind of hallucinogen that makes squiggles on a page (or scratches embedded in vinyl) seem real. This dissonance is, to me at least, unaccountable. Maybe Noon wants to be a musician instead, or maybe he wants to suggest that these artificial means of connecting with humanity aren't entirely sufficient, or maybe his point is that bassists are shallow and shouldn't get to narrate. At the end of the whole everything, though, I'm left thinking that this book didn't know what it wanted to be.
November 7, 2024
An often poetic dark love song to Manchester music-making in the 80s/90s. The chopped-up sentence fragments remind me of song lyrics. While the writing can seem a little dated these days, it did hold my attention for the most part.
It's a tricky novel to pull off, and the concluding section can certainly be tighter. The "music as drug" device is pretty interesting, but probably wore out its welcome by the end.The characters seem a bit underdeveloped beyond Elliot and 2spot's family traumas.
It's probably not fair for me to compare this with Joel Lane's From Blue to Black, one of my favorite novels about post-punk music-making, also set in the post-industrial north of the UK (but Birmingham, not Manchester). I did miss the pleasures of Lane's book and characters while making my way through Needle on a long flight.
It's a tricky novel to pull off, and the concluding section can certainly be tighter. The "music as drug" device is pretty interesting, but probably wore out its welcome by the end.The characters seem a bit underdeveloped beyond Elliot and 2spot's family traumas.
It's probably not fair for me to compare this with Joel Lane's From Blue to Black, one of my favorite novels about post-punk music-making, also set in the post-industrial north of the UK (but Birmingham, not Manchester). I did miss the pleasures of Lane's book and characters while making my way through Needle on a long flight.
March 14, 2012
Having read several other of Noon's books, I found this one very different but no less enjoyable. Instead of creating a whole new imaginary world (as in Vurt etc), this is a tale based around a real Manchester, drawing inspiration from five decades of a genre-spanning music scene, focusing mainly on punk and the death thereof. The book is still touched with fantasy but it is more of a means to an end rather than the main thrust of the book. It is set in our normal world and the fantasy element (I won't give away any details) allows the characters to explore themselves, their music and the past.
It is written in, what I find to be, an amazing style, though I can see how some people might struggle with it. There is little punctuation/ the phrases instead being separated by slashes/ these give the book a sort of digital feel/ and at the same time/ the feeling of reading inside someone's head/ their thoughts put straight down on paper/ instead of being thought over and tidied up first. See what I mean?
The book is full of music and the descriptions of songs blew my mind, particularly when King Crimson happened to come on the radio while I was reading. After a chapter where, perhaps, the band meet up to rehearse, there will be a page long chapter 'describing' ('writing' or 'telling' might be better verbs here) the song itself in beautiful, exploding, starbursts streaming over the riffs, poetry that I think can only be fully appreciated by someone who really appreciates music, whatever your chosen genre.
All in all, this is a book about music and musicians; how they come to be and how they often come to end.
It is written in, what I find to be, an amazing style, though I can see how some people might struggle with it. There is little punctuation/ the phrases instead being separated by slashes/ these give the book a sort of digital feel/ and at the same time/ the feeling of reading inside someone's head/ their thoughts put straight down on paper/ instead of being thought over and tidied up first. See what I mean?
The book is full of music and the descriptions of songs blew my mind, particularly when King Crimson happened to come on the radio while I was reading. After a chapter where, perhaps, the band meet up to rehearse, there will be a page long chapter 'describing' ('writing' or 'telling' might be better verbs here) the song itself in beautiful, exploding, starbursts streaming over the riffs, poetry that I think can only be fully appreciated by someone who really appreciates music, whatever your chosen genre.
All in all, this is a book about music and musicians; how they come to be and how they often come to end.
June 26, 2012
Wildly inventive, music brought to words, words transliterated into musical sound. If you can imagine such a thing! Verbal dubs, reverb and remixes all dance across the pages. The plot is a bit weak, Noon's usual obsessions with trying to recapture a girl long lost but preserved in an aching heart. The history of generational repeated behaviour is just a bit soap operatic for my taste, but I just lay back and let the word vive infuse my whole body.
July 16, 2024
This book was a discovery from Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds, where it was described using a few key phrases such as "cyberpunk" and "Manchester music scene." That was just about all I had to go on, so it was tough going when I began a book written in stream-of-consciousness style with all lower case letters and minimal punctuation.
At the start, I didn't like this book. It relies on the reader to infer a lot in order to follow the story, which only truly coheres later on. It begins as a book about a bassist joining a band, and really kicks into gear with an interesting studio innovation. Music can be recorded into blue liquid inside a sort of snow globe, and a shake of the globe creates a remixed version of the music. That, to me, is the most interesting bit. We're getting to a point where AI might viably be the tech imagined here. However, this liquid also serves the narrative, as the characters get to find other, shall we say, uses for the remix liquid.
The overall vibe of the book is quite dark, and the prose style often feels more like song lyrics than anything else. It was tough going at times, but there were also moments of spiky, punk, poetry that I enjoyed. Overall, I would only recommend it to a specific type of reader: someone with an interest in the alterntive music of the 70s/80s, and/or an imagined future Manchester.
At the start, I didn't like this book. It relies on the reader to infer a lot in order to follow the story, which only truly coheres later on. It begins as a book about a bassist joining a band, and really kicks into gear with an interesting studio innovation. Music can be recorded into blue liquid inside a sort of snow globe, and a shake of the globe creates a remixed version of the music. That, to me, is the most interesting bit. We're getting to a point where AI might viably be the tech imagined here. However, this liquid also serves the narrative, as the characters get to find other, shall we say, uses for the remix liquid.
The overall vibe of the book is quite dark, and the prose style often feels more like song lyrics than anything else. It was tough going at times, but there were also moments of spiky, punk, poetry that I enjoyed. Overall, I would only recommend it to a specific type of reader: someone with an interest in the alterntive music of the 70s/80s, and/or an imagined future Manchester.
January 27, 2025
A novel that combines Jon Anderson's ambiguous song lyrics with the modernity of a James Joyce novel. I really enjoyed how certain passages got repeated in new, distorted ways, which not only played back into the narrative and its theme, but helped illuminate throwaway passages time and time again. The narrative itself, however, was a bit cliched, and was hard to follow at certain points as the pages blended into word soup at points. However, it did keep me engaged all the way through, and is a very quick read, so if this interests you, you won't be disappointed.
February 17, 2021
Совсем небольшая новелла, несмотря на заявления об экспериментальности, не сильно экспериментальнее трилогии "Вирт" того же автора. Даже темы поднимаются схожие: субстанции, вызываемые ими коллективные галлюцинации, потеря и поиск в них себя. Очень музыкальная и поэтичная книга, читать было сплошное удовольствие.
June 13, 2021
4th re-read. I will never tire of this story. My favourite Noon novel.
It reads with the pace and density of a cyberpunk novel but about dance music and drugs instead.
I love the twisty tale and the way the story and its chapters are constantly remixed like their music.
I love it. I find it moving and strange, everything is focused on the story and it feels so intense.
It reads with the pace and density of a cyberpunk novel but about dance music and drugs instead.
I love the twisty tale and the way the story and its chapters are constantly remixed like their music.
I love it. I find it moving and strange, everything is focused on the story and it feels so intense.
August 3, 2024
Gale of Waterdeep (Tim Downie) mentioned this on his tiktok last year. Based upon his brief review I decided to read it. It was not easy to track down. I eventually found a copy (through Amazon) at a used bookstore in the UK.
It was worth the trouble.
Just a heads up to potential readers, Noon does not use typical punctuation or capitalization.
It was worth the trouble.
Just a heads up to potential readers, Noon does not use typical punctuation or capitalization.
June 1, 2023
Nevaru saprast, patika vai nē? Stils ļoti savāds. Sākumā nevar iebraukt, bet vēlāk pierod un sāk pat patikt. Stāsts interesants, ievelk dziļi jo dziļi, bet tas stils. Bet iespējams savādāk to nemaz nevar izstāstīt. 3 acis.
March 21, 2021
A reread for me and 21 years after publication, this still holds up, despite the changes in music trends it deals in. Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPoOP...
July 9, 2023
This is amazing. I can always count on Jeff Noon to blow my socks off with his incredible imaginative stories. big fan / always will.
March 3, 2024
So good! One of my favourites.
November 5, 2024
Story is a 3/5, the writing and lyricism is a solid 5/5
June 24, 2013
Written in chunks between slashes, images splilling over each other spaced out like a lyric sheet. The novel uses one unexplained sci-fi concept which is really just a device to get to delving into the poetry and explore the ties between music, history and family. Felt like an early MTV (back when they played music and was worth watching) being victim to William S. Burroughs' editing experiments. If you're looking for a traditional narrative, don't pick this up. If you love modern music and want your brain stretched, pick it up.
December 12, 2011
A novel to savior in small doses. The layout of the text encourages reading some passages like poetry, some like prose, some like art. The musical timberline from skiffle through punk and new wave to down tempo and groove makes a fine backdrop for a gritty story of longing and discovery. I suspect this is the experience my English teachers wanted me to get from The Catcher in the Rye.
December 24, 2012
The style, a stark lyrical stream of consciousness, works far better than I feared it would. It both sets and suits the mood, and captures the perfect atmosphere for the first half of Needle In The Groove. But then the plot (such as there is one) starts to take over, and its like waking from a dream before you were done: the spell is broken.
January 23, 2014
Jeff Noon uses cut-up technique / makes it an interesting read / fast-paced, aggressive, captivating at times / occasionally a bit frustrating / captures voice well / good sense of rhythm through language / thus reflecting dance music / good for fans of Manchester music scene / name checks many musical heroes / plot is reminiscent of Vurt / worth a spin.
May 30, 2014
i love jeff noon. he writes with a complete lack of fear and without rules. every time i finish one of his novels (even one i have previously read) i want to go and write something myself. if you can motivate me then you must be doing something right
Currently reading
March 14, 2007it was a cheap book. yet to finish.
April 24, 2007
Trippy, stoner-riffic, phychadelic account of a band trying to make it big in the mid ninties. Crazy.
May 14, 2009
I really struggled to get into this book, so much so that I gave up on it. I thought I would enjoy as I had loved previous works by this author, particularly Vurt.
Might venture back one day
Might venture back one day
October 23, 2007
"if music were a drug would you take it" Hell yes!
January 4, 2008
probably my favorite one of all
July 19, 2009
Vurt and pollen are still best but another great fiction story based on our a latest social evolutions!!
June 25, 2013
Impressive, but quite a difficult read, due to the experimental chopped-up language, and unconventional punctuation. Still very atmospheric, if considerably less enjoyable than Falling Out of Cars.
May 17, 2014
Ak vai.
Es mēģināšu atsauksmi, bet man pazuda valoda. Ir tikai apturēta sirds un mutuļojošas emocijas.
Es mēģināšu atsauksmi, bet man pazuda valoda. Ir tikai apturēta sirds un mutuļojošas emocijas.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews