The British novelist’s first memoir is a sublime account of famed Welsh music studio Rockfield, where her indomitable mother ruled the kitchen in the 70s and rock’n’rollers were great fun – and infuriating
Sometimes the most compelling family memoirs are not those that recount particularly extraordinary lives but which, rather, are told in the most beguiling voice. Tiffany Murray recounts hers from the perspective of an eight-year-old and so fills these pages with the giddy, carbonated fizz of prepubescence. She erupts frequently into different-sized fonts whenever she needs to convey maximum glee and trips into onomatopoeia (“ujjjjj aaah caaaah”) when normal words simply won’t suffice. In this way, she is able to smuggle into the narrative, almost unseen, a correspondingly piercing pathos that, in the hands of others, might just have tipped this towards misery memoir. Instead, the abiding tone is one of wonder and joy.
An author with three novels to her name, Murray is making her first foray into memoir with My Family and Other Rock Stars. It recounts the time of her growing up in and around the famous Rockfield music studios in Wales in the mid-1970s. This was where her mother, Joan, served as its resident chef, cooking for visiting bands such as Motörhead, Showaddywaddy and Black Sabbath, who, between them, were demanding, entertaining and often exasperating.
