December 4, 2017
This enjoyable memoir chronicles author and broadcaster Clarke Champniss’s journey from British discotheques to the Canadian Arctic and into his career in music journalism. The early chapters recount his teenage years spent navigating the music and football-obsessed youth cultures of early 1970s London. Dodging gangs of skinheads, rockers, mods, and soccer hooligans, Clarke Champniss (The Republic of Rock ‘n’ Roll) became a fixture in the city’s disco scene until his father encouraged him to seek work with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “I wanted adventure,” he writes, and he found it in Canada, working as a clerk in the company’s Arctic settlements. There, in temperatures that froze his watch to his skin, Inuit friends taught him to fish and hunt on the ice and he introduced them to David Bowie’s songs. Later, as a student at the University of British Columbia, he steered his love of pop music into deejay gigs, and he takes readers on a vivid tour through disco and the club scenes in Vancouver, B.C., and Palm Springs, Fla. Anyone interested in the Arctic, pop music, youth culture, and that mystical period known as the ’70s will find Clarke Champniss’s story immensely entertaining.