John Moore, Singer, songwriter, guitar player, writer, poet, painter, thinker, bipolar, insomniac, temperamental, cantankerous, occasionally amusing. Once imported Absinthe. Loves books, cats and rock and roll. Formerly of Black Box Recorder, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Lives in London.

Brian David Stevens, Photographer, work held by the National Portrait Gallery and the National Galleries Of Scotland, published worldwide. Welsh parents and brought up in Yorkshire. Favourite colour is gold.

Extracts from the opening of the book:

The writer and musician John Moore achieved early notoriety as part of the Jesus and Mary Chain pop group, and solo success with Polydor records, recording his debut album at New York's legendary Electric Lady studios. He later went on to co-found Black Box Recorder, writing three albums, and scoring several chart hits.

Never quite 'of the times', he spent long periods languishing in deep thought, and suffered prolonged bouts of chronic depression, often allowing others to profit more from his work than he did. Eventually diagnosed as type 1 bipolar, he could be a 'difficult' person to be around.

...The bipolar upswing that occurred wiped out everything around him. Songs begun decades ago, or right there and then, seeped into one another. Half-formed ideas that had floated harmlessly in his head, locked and loaded, their aim deadly. He felt invincible. A channel of communication was open, a listening post at the border or life and death. Any line or rhyme was his for the taking. It was a songwriter's dream, but a human being's nightmare. An hour's recording became twenty-four hours at a sitting, hunched over a screen, intense, rigid and utterly driven, each day and night. The outside world vanished, human contact evaporated.

...Halfway through the recording, his world collapsed. An utterly destructive, massive breakdown – perhaps years in the making, but unleashed in one devastating torrent of blackness - like an oil strike from hell, struck him down, and then it went dark. A wrecked personal life, a cleaved-apart psyche, he sat among shards of broken glass, metaphorical and literal, punching his face, burning his skin, and marveling at a dead man from Seattle who had stolen a passenger jet, looped the loop in the sunset, then crashed it into a deserted island.

On the 13th August Moore tried to join him.

52 pages of photographs and texts