Music

INTERVIEW: Pearl Jam biography author Ronen Givony

12:15 pm on 7 November 2020

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Seattle band Pearl Jam have recorded 11 studio albums, sold 85 million+ albums, played over 1000 shows and had 5 albums reach number one. But after over thirty years of success, why aren't Pearl Jam thought of as fondly as other bands like Nirvana?

New biography Not for You: Pearl Jam and the Present Tense is a" tribute to a famously obsessive fan base, in the spirit of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. It's an old-fashioned - if, at times, ambivalent - appreciation; a reflection on pleasure, fandom, and guilt; and an essay on the nature of adolescence, nostalgia, and adulthood."

Pearl Jam and the Present Tense is the first full-length biography about Pearl Jam. A must read for lovers (and haters) of the band, the biography dissects the band's role in music history from the explosion of grunge in the early '90s, to their more disputed recent content

Charlotte Ryan speaks to the book's author, Ronen Givony, about the band's impact as she attempts to get to the bottom of why Pearl Jam have become such a polarizing band.

Not for You: Pearl Jam and the Present Tense Photo: supplied