Angie Moon talks Crime of the Century on Braggland

Last week I went on my friend Willy’s podcast that he usually does with his friend Jimi Sunderland called Braggland, but this time his friend Warren from Extra Bulla filled in for Jimi. Both of them like music from the classic rock era so I was happy to go on the podcast to talk about my upcoming book, Crime of the Century, which is available to preorder and ships in March. This is my first podcast appearance to promote my book, and hopefully not the last one! If any classic rock or true crime podcasters are reading this, I’d love to go on your podcast!

Here are a couple quotes from the interview:

An introduction on who I am and what I do:

I’m Angie Moon and I’m a classic rock historian and I’ve been writing a blog called The Diversity of Classic Rock since 2015 and I started that as a school project during my bachelor’s degree when I was studying communications and I liked writing about classic rock so much that I continued writing about it ever since then. For the past few years I’ve been working on a classic rock and true crime book called Crime of the Century: Classic Rock & True Crime and it’s all true stories about classic rock and true crime colliding together. The first section is about musicians who encountered murderers, serial killers, and attempted murderers and the second section is about musicians who killed people.

What inspired the book:

Basically where it all began was I’ve been into true crime ever since I was 8 or 9 years old. My dad and I would watch true crime documentaries every weekend, so it’s a Friday night [episode was streamed live on a Friday night], during my childhood right now we would be watching true crime documentaries like 48 Hours, 20/20… and Dateline.

And then when I was a teenager I remember the Investigation Discovery channel came out and that was something I would spend all summer long watching when I was not in school. And as a teenager I got into classic rock thanks to The Beatles and Austin Powers. So I took two of my favourite interests and mashed them together and the inspiration was… There were two classic rock stories that inspired me and they’re both sibling bands. So the first one would be The Kinks, I’ve been into The Kinks ever since I was young and getting into classic rock as a teenager, but I’ve learnt so much more about them. There’s so much to learn about them and one of the things I’ve learnt is that they didn’t just have one true crime connection, but two true crime connections. The first one is with John Wayne Gacy. They met him in 1965 because he was promoting a concert that The Kinks were playing in Springfield, Illinois and John Wayne Gacy was a Jaycee and he was pretty high up in that Jaycees chapter in Springfield so he was promoting the concert as part of his duties there. And we’re not sure exactly to what extent The Kinks had contact with him, but it seems like they did meet. The other one is back in London, where The Kinks are from. The Kray twins wanted to manage The Kinks and the Kray twins wanted Ray and Dave Davies to star in a biopic of theirs but that didn’t happen. Instead another set of brothers called Martin and Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, they played them in The Krays from 1990. That movie is a favourite of Quentin Tarantino’s.

The other band that inspired me to write this book would be The Beach Boys. So I don’t know how well this fact is known. I’d like to think it’s common knowledge, but maybe it isn’t. They had contact with Charles Manson. So Dennis Wilson was, you know, driving and then a couple of Charles Manson’s girls were hitchhiking and then he picked them up and brought them back to his house and then they were saying, ‘you gotta bring Charles Manson over!’ Charles Manson came over and then, long story short, Dennis Wilson recorded one of Charles Manson’s compositions. Now how I heard about this the first time was on a radio show back in Ireland. So I had a friend in journalism class named Cillian, he’s since passed away – rest in peace, and he played one of Charles Manson’s songs, I believe it was either “Never Learn Not To Love” [that’s what The Beach Boys called the song] or “Cease to Exist” [original title by Charles Manson] or it was “Look At Your Game Girl”. He played one of those two and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even introduce the song or anything. He was just playing it, no context, nothing, and then he said, ‘Hey Angie, what do you think of the song?’ And I was like, ‘That’s pretty good!’ And then he was like ‘That’s by Charles Manson!’ So that lowkey was an inspiration for me to write the book and I wanted to find out how many other connections, I kept finding more and more connections from there and that’s how the book was born. Originally I was gonna make it a blog post but then my husband Eoin was like, ‘You have to make this into a book!’ and so I did.

Click here to watch the video. The first half is about me and my book and the second half is their usual political content.

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