“With his energetic and fluid writing, vivid and entertaining interviews, and focus on fine art’s relationship to the origins of post-punk, Gavin Butt brings a new and valuable perspective to music’s history. Exciting and original, No Machos or Pop Stars invites us to hear post-punk in a new way.” - Mimi Haddon, author of What Is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977–82
“Beautifully written and meticulously researched, No Machos or Pop Stars will intrigue anyone with interests in politics, education, art, and popular music. Using a focus on Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s, Gavin Butt brings together theoretical acumen with vivid personal testimony to tell an engrossing tale of power, pedagogy, and dissent. This is a fascinating story of how fine art painters and performers became post-punk and pop pioneers.” - Green Gartside, singer-songwriter, Scritti Politti
"A fascinating, informed and highly readable account. . . ." - Rupert Loydell, International Times
"This is an important book. . . . It reminds us of—and perhaps implicitly yearns for—a time when a university art school education was free, open, inclusive, and multidisciplinary, where theory was able to re-energise practice and offered new paths out of the cul-de-sacs of art practice, where a local scene that was largely self-supporting and independent could be local without ever being parochial, where contemporary debates arising out of feminism, race, and left-wing politics could be acted out in an exciting form of ‘praxis’ and where competition between educational institutions could be collapsed, where a small city like Leeds could host a self-supporting creative eco-system where students were able to freely cross-pollinate." - Aidan Winterburn, Tribune Magazine
“No Machos or Pop Stars is an account of the plethora of post-punk bands that emerged out of the ‘Leeds experiment.’ . . . The range and richness of Butt’s research is evident throughout.” - Peter Suchin, Art Monthly
"As a history of educational ideas and systems this book is excellent. As a work of cultural history it is superb. . . this is also a book about music and musicians and it is full to the brim with insightful anecdotes and recollections from those who were active participants within this pre-figurative artistic community. It is a deft piece of writing and structural organisation, and there is no shortage of visual materials either. . . . No Machos or Pop Stars is extremely thorough and thoroughly readable." - Richard Thomas, The Wire
"More powerful than [Butt's] scholarship, and his own voluminous interviewing of those in the scene, is his clear passion. He writes as someone moved by the music, weird, wonderful, and varied, that Leeds spawned, groups like Delta 5, Gang of Four, Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, and the Mekons." - George Yatchisin, California Review of Books
"The conclusive thought that welcomes us at the end of Butt’s comprehensive book is to do with how this local artistic climate moved on from the disillusionment of punk artists, towards a politically charged social movement-savvy visual art environments after the 1980s that somewhat brought an end to this local milieu." - Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, Cultural Studies
"Written with both scholarly precision and an evident fan's enthusiasm, the book is a serious history of popular modernism in West Yorkshire, as well as a social sketch of artists and young people reacting to a collapsing society with a rarely matched intellectual, aesthetic and social application. . . . A welcome feature of No Machos—which is sadly unusual in many books related to punk and post-punk—is a contextualisation of the environment that created these scenes." - Marcus Barnett, Corridor 8
"Gavin Butt’s book No Machos or Pop Stars provides an engaging account of how the radical art school environment in Leeds in the late 1970s fostered a critical approach among its students, many of whom then applied this to their music. ... [It] provides a fascinating insight into how the budding bands built on the collaborative approach championed in the art schools, forming overlapping groups of friends and enabling cross-cultural and social experimentation."
- Rebecca Binns,
Historical Studies in Education
"As a detailed account of a particularly disputational moment in academic history, No Machos Or Pop Stars is fascinating, instructive, and fun. It is refreshing to read a book about art schools and popular music which spends time exploring what the musicians did in their classes and studios, and Butt’s use of oral history is indeed an excellent way of bringing to life these students’ art school experiences: their nervous excitement, immediate confusion, and gradual disillusionment." - Simon Frith, Journal of Popular Music Studies
