The Girl in the Back: A Female Drummer’s Life with Bowie, Blondie and the ’70s Rock Scene
by Laura Davis-Chanin
(Backbeat Books, £19.99)

“THIS is not the book you think it is,” warns Laura Davis-Chanin at the start of The Girl in the Back.

So it proves in this memoir from the former drummer of the band Student Teachers, who score highly in the “almost famous” ranks. But rather than dining out on stories of rock and roll excess, she offers a cautionary tale from the vantage point of someone who’s now comfortable with her more studious life.

Joining the band while still in her mid-teens, she was a reluctant musician who was seduced by the punk scene in downtown New York. Despite never having played an instrument, she turned out to be a natural, influencing Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley, who writes the book’s introduction, and Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach.

It’s an impact that testifies to both the band’s impressive gigging record and the rarity of being in a female rhythm section at the time. This uniqueness helped to attract attention, with Blondie’s Jimmy Destri shaping their career and producing their debut 1979 single.

When he started a relationship with Davis-Chanin while she was still at high school — uncomfortable reading in the era of #MeToo, even though there’s no suggestion of coercion — the connection helped her meet David Bowie, get a support slot with Iggy Pop and almost land a record deal with RCA. The vox pops with ex-band members about this is a nice touch.

Her prose is breathless as she details the seeming ease with which the band became mainstays on the scene, capturing the excitement and creativity of the time. It’s clear that despite her talent as a drummer she never regarded herself as a musician but as a fan, becoming starstruck when in the presence of Bowie.

Her relationship nonetheless created a schism within the unit and Davis-Chanin drifted out of the orbit of her friends and into the hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting world of the rock elite, one in which she struggled.

The central tension of the book lies between her love of music and her more academic nature and this internal pressure is resolved when, at the age of 18, she’s diagnosed with MS. The enforced rest affords her the time to reassess her life and when Bowie visits and asks what she wants to do she doesn’t hesitate before saying, “go to college.”

It’s a pivotal moment and one that perfectly illustrates her philosophical approach to music and to turning life’s blows into a positive.