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Ian Glasper: Silence Is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans book (2023, PM Press)
As a decades-long fan of the Subhumans, I was super excited when I heard the band was getting an official biography. They’re one of my favorite groups ever, and while I know their music very well, I didn’t know much about the Subhumans’ history and backstory. Weighing in at nearly 600 pages, Ian Glasper’s monster tome offers a treasure trove of information. Maybe it’s a fans-only affair, but Subhumans fans like me—and I know there are many—will love it.
I first heard Subhumans when I was a teenager in the mid-90s. A pen pal included a couple of songs from The Day the Country Died on a mix tape and I loved them, their subtle tunefulness standing out from the gnarlier sounds from most of the other bands on the tape. I don’t think I found any of the Subhumans’ records until I saw their first reunion tour in 1998, when I picked up The Day the Country Died at the gig. That show was incredible, and it left a big mark on me. As I picked up the band’s other records in subsequent years, my love for them only deepened. As much as I loved The Day the Country Died, the way they leaned into their adventurous side without compromising the punk intensity was also very important to me, showing me you could be ambitious and follow your own path without compromising your principles.
I developed that understanding of the Subhumans almost exclusively through listening to their music, but Silence Is No Reaction confirms Subhumans are the good guys I thought they were. The book goes into the nuts and bolts of how the band functioned (and continues to function!) on an almost day-to-day basis, walking us through their decision-making at every stage of their development. You learn all about how they formed, signed to Spiderleg, started the Bluurg Records label, why they chose the recording studios they used, the sequencing, creating the artwork… everything. If you’ve ever read a music biography and thought to yourself, “I can’t believe they glossed over x,” this is not that book.
That can be for better or for worse. The book can get a little tedious, for instance, as it traces each of the band’s tours (particularly during their reformed era, when the members lived in different countries and did little as a band aside from tour). Ian Glasper has written several books on 80s UK punk, and if you’ve read Burning Britain (his book on UK82), The Day the Country Died (anarcho punk), or any of his others, you know what you’re getting into. I love it, but I am also a full-on nerd who does things like listen to 3-hour-plus episodes of the You Don’t Know Mojack podcast about SST Records releases I have never heard and will never hear. I want to know it all, and Silence Is No Reaction delivers.
Silence Is No Reaction is also packed with photos and scans of flyers, lyric sheets, set lists, press clippings, and other artifacts. Every third or fourth page is filled with images, and while the heroic live shots are cool, I love the candid shots of the band just hanging out. Sometimes they might be out of focus or awkwardly composed, but many of them are so evocative of their time and place, offering windows into worlds that seem so different from my experiences. Reading the book made me feel embedded in the band’s world, and its intimacy made me feel even more connected to a band I already counted as one of my favorites. I also felt that connection when I browsed the detailed listing of of the band’s gigs, which not only lists the dates and cities, but usually the venue, opening bands, and number of attendees as well. Of course, the first thing I did was look up the gigs I saw, remembering who played, who I went with, and everything else that comes flooding back. The book makes me feel like those aren’t just my isolated memories, they’re times I shared with the Subhumans and all their other fans.
We had some copies of Silence Is No Reaction in stock at Sorry State, but we’re sold out at the moment. I’ll do my best to get a restock in soon!