After a couple of years of me keeping tight-lipped and alluding to this very dark themed classic rock book, I am finally ready to share the topic of my book. If you’ve been following me on other social media sites you might notice that everything has gotten darker. A couple years ago I dyed my hair back to its original colour and chose more darker, cooler tones in my clothing. I got more and more into gothic aesthetics, quite the contrast from the colourful, bright look of this website. In this blog post I want to go more in depth into my thought process into the book and its theme. I’ve already announced Crime of the Century on my other social media sites, but I wanted to take a more longform approach here. You might notice that some of these things I was talking about were alluded to in my blog posts, like Easter eggs. I wonder if anyone cracked the code and found out what was on my mind.

Announcing Crime of the Century

I approached this project as not just a book, but a work of art – a nod to aestheticism, a recent hyperfixation of mine. For years I’ve been working on The Diversity of Classic Rock and I wanted to take it to the next level. Great writing and research can only take you so far, you also need a vision and a concept and so I got thinking. I’m constantly thinking about my writing. When I’m not writing, I’m always thinking of new ideas for my writing. So let’s take it back to the birth of this idea and the concept. For that, we need to go back to May 2021.

Crime of the Century is born

I was in my kitchen with my husband talking about some future writing plans and I told my husband I wanted to write about the connections between classic rock and true crime. What inspired this exactly? Back in university, I guested on a friend’s radio show and my friend played a really nice sounding 60s folk song and he wanted to get my opinion on it. I thought it was a pretty good song. Well, it turns out it was by Charles Manson and my friend dropped this bombshell on me. I was just shocked. I’ve been into true crime ever since I was a child and I’d watch true crime documentaries with my dad every weekend: 20/20, 48 Hours, Dateline, you name it. As a teenager I’d watch shows on Investigation Discovery for hours on end. Many of you don’t know this side of me, but now you know another one of my interests.

I knew about the Manson Family, but I had no idea that Charles Manson was a musician and he had this connection to The Beach Boys. All I knew was the Tate-LaBianca murders. Fast forward a couple of years and I’m working on my blog post about The Kinks, Listen To This, Not That! I read everything I could about The Kinks and I found that not only was there one true crime connection: The Kinks meeting John Wayne Gacy on their disastrous 1965 American tour (that got them banned from America), they also had a connection to The Kray twins, two of Britain’s most notorious gangsters. I knew there was something there, classic rock and true crime and so I kept researching and finding more connections. Two of my biggest interests, this is right up my alley. The original plan was to write a blog post about it, but when I told my husband about it, he was like, ‘No, you have to make this a book!’ To make it just a blog post would be a waste. I’ve wanted to write a book about classic rock, and what better topic and angle than classic rock and true crime?

There’s so much content there! I had quite a few stories already in my outline, but over time I did more and more research and kept uncovering more things about classic rock and true crime and in the end, I ended up with 22 chapters and over 100,000 words! And that’s just part one! I have a whole part two planned. There are two sections in this book. The first one is 12 chapters about musicians who had encounters with murderers and attempted murderers and the second one is 10 chapters about musicians from the classic rock era who killed people. Even then, I keep finding more stories (and probably will find more stories) and I guess those will become bonus content for the blog, lucky you! Might be posting some bonus content that didn’t make it into the book here. So keep on the lookout for that!

When looking up classic rock and true crime, I couldn’t find any book that was exclusively about that and a compilation of all these stories. The closest thing I could find was the Disgraceland Podcast and their book, but that’s more music in general and very Americanised in focus. While I’m a classic rock specialist and know both the American and British sides of music. My goal is to write the most comprehensive books on classic rock and true crime and I hope I have succeeded in this endeavour.

The Title

If you know your classic rock, you’ll recognise the title comes from Supertramp’s 1974 album of the same name. I love to incorporate classic rock references into everything I do and what better title than Crime of the Century? Trial of the Century… Crime of the Century. Simple as. My book’s coming out 50 years after the album… pretty cool! I’m just fascinated with numbers and dates.

The Aesthetic

Now let’s come back to the aesthetic of the book, the imagery. You know they say ‘never judge a book by its cover’. Well, we all know that we all do that anyway. First impressions are important and image is important even if you’re not making a movie or something visual. I’m not just going to sell a book, I want to sell an experience, an image, a work of art. It’s a concept. I don’t think of myself as ordinary or boring and I don’t want those words associated with me or anything I do or make.

My original plan for the aesthetic was to take the aesthetic of Supertramp’s Crime of the Century album cover as inspiration, outer space, jail bars floating around in the void, maybe incorporate some investigation/conspiracy looking stuff in for fun. Okay, that’s a concept, but it didn’t have that impact and beauty that I wanted. I like outer space and I think it looks cool, but how would I create a whole image around it and market it that way? This book needs to be a whole package and an experience, and that theme wasn’t giving that.

Another early idea I had was to do something psychedelic for the book cover. I love bright colours, but it wasn’t appropriate for the subject matter. True crime is not bright or colourful, and it’s disrespectful and jarring to girlypop-ify it. There had to be something aesthetically pleasing, but also fitting… What aesthetic can do the job? Which one understands the assignment?

As a kid I was fascinated with older houses and things from way before my time. While midcentury modern homes aren’t really that ‘old’ in the grand scheme of things, I loved how homes from that time period and before. It had so much more character than the bland modern homes I grew up in, built in the 90s and 2000s. When I went to my great aunt’s house, I loved how much character and uniqueness the home had and I loved the vibe. Like a lot of girls from my generation, I loved the American Girl dolls and the escapism their historic-inspired stories offered. I loved history class. Near my dad’s old job at a factory there was this old Victorian house that always caught my eye. It looked haunted. It looked different. It stood out. I always liked standing out and being different from the crowd. I don’t care for trends. I just do what I want. Also during my childhood there was a movie called The Haunted Mansion. It got bad reviews, but I loved this movie and I loved the Disney ride that the movie was based on. So that was an inspiration. But something had to inspire The Haunted Mansion, what came before it?

One of my big aesthetic influences lately is the goth subculture, which takes a lot of inspiration from the Victorian era – literature like The Raven, Dracula, Dorian Gray. Even as a kid I thought it looked cool and I guess in a way I was born to be that since I have extremely black hair and I overall have a melancholy vibe. I always have this resting sad face. I love to laugh, but I’m not a smiley person. One day I was browsing on social media for inspiration and I came across a picture of a shelf full of antique books probably from the Victorian or Edwardian era and I think the caption read something like ‘I wish they still made books like this’. That was my ‘Eureka!’ moment. And so I went down this rabbit hole looking at Victorian book covers and got some inspiration.

Why Belle Époque? Why Art Nouveau? Why aestheticism? Well, when doing research about psychedelic art, I learnt about its roots in Art Nouveau, like if you imagine a family tree for art, Art Nouveau is psychedelic art’s parent. Psychedelic art of the 60s took Art Nouveau on an acid trip, modernising it with bright colours, making it fresh. Hippies loved the ornate floral designs and prints and sweeping curvy lines. Rock bands travelled to Europe and loved those beautiful Art Nouveau buildings. Heck, the symbols for the Aesthetic Movement were sunflowers, lilies, and peacocks – things you could see a bit of in 60s fashion. The Peacock Revolution – to do a little family tree of sorts, the ancestor of the 60s dandy was the Victorian dandy! You can see references to Alphonse Mucha in psychedelic concert posters. And while I don’t know if he’s considered art nouveau, you’ll see that the photos of musicians I used for the book’s countdown are photoshopped onto Aubrey Beardsley drawings. If you know about his art, you’ll know that it was provocative for the time and that’s the spirit of rock and roll! The spirit of rock and roll wasn’t born in the 50s, it’s always been in us, throughout human history, that’s what I think. That’s what I imagined the marriage of classic rock and a haunted mansion/gothic aesthetic to look like. May seem random, but Beardsley’s art inspired some classic rock album covers like Klaus Voormann’s Revolver album cover for The Beatles (a cardboard cutout of Beardsley is on the Sgt Pepper cover – imo he kinda looked like Ringo) and One of his drawings for Salomé was used for the cover of Humble Pie’s self-titled 1970 album.

I didn’t want to just stop there at the book cover. Oh no, I wanted the marketing to be on theme and on brand for the book and so while I was in Ireland waiting on the purchase of the house to go through, I was brainstorming ideas for the living room. I knew that I had to get an antique divan/fainting couch/chaise longue/what have you. Where did I get this idea? From a meme someone made of Ray Davies:

And so I bought the fainting couch of my dreams and it was the first thing that arrived to the house. The next thing to arrive was a sofa from the 1860s, which you’ll see in the announcement video for my book and the photo at the top of this blog post. My husband jokingly calls it the ‘famine sofa’ (in case anyone’s not aware, my husband is Irish, so he can make that joke, okay?), because the eBay listing said it was from 1860s Ireland, probably in some rich Protestant’s house. Little by little, I amassed furniture with a similar vibe, although probably not as old as the fainting couch and the sofa, giving it that old fashioned, haunted mansion look.

The Countdown photos:

I decided to start the countdown on 1 October since it’s Halloween month and what better time to reveal a true crime book than October? Even if it’s not coming out for another few months. I decided to drop pictures out of context as teasers, hinting that all of these musicians had one thing in common. These are the photos:

All of these musicians had a connection to a murderer or attempted murderer.

Just a selection of the musicians I’ll be talking about in the book. I’ll be revealing more as the book’s release date gets closer.

Interestingly enough, no one guessed it correctly. I thought it would have been obvious with the picture of Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet as the Kray twins and The Beach Boys, but maybe people don’t know these stories. Just some reasons to buy the book!

One last Aubrey Beardsley edit, the book announcement:

The reason I chose that Celtic font was because I wrote the book while I was in Ireland and I’ll be incorporating a bit of that aesthetic in the book cover. Can’t wait to share that with you!

The Announcement video:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Angie Moon 🌙 🍄 (@angiemichellemoon)

If you don’t have Instagram, no problem, the video has also been posted to my YouTube channel.

The video is pretty self-explanatory. I put a lot of thought into the way I was dressed, because remember, I’m not just writing a book, I’m trying to make it artistic and give it a whole image and concept with a lot of thought put into it. I wanted a dress that combined the classic rock era with this Victorian haunted mansion aesthetic. It had to be a long dress, but also one with a classic rock era aesthetic. One of my favourite vintage reproduction brands, Scorpio Rising, does made to measure dresses (which I need given my body shape) and when I saw their Morgiana dress, I knew that was it! I was stuck between the red or the emerald green velvet, but I chose the green because of how much it reminded me of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, particularly ones by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When I first tried it on I was like ‘It’s giving Persephone!’ – A beautiful painting from 1874, with William Morris’s wife Jane Morris as the model. I guess 1870s meets 1970s? I really need to take a picture of myself holding a pomegranate while wearing this dress. It is pomegranate season after all, right?

If you’re into fashion, I got plenty more looks where that came from.

In conclusion:

If you like classic rock and/or true crime, you’ll love the book. This isn’t just a classic rock book or a true crime book. This is classic rock storytelling, something I’ve been doing for the last almost decade on the blog. I hope you will enjoy it and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the book.

Love,

Angie

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