Open
Your Arms

They formed in the bleak winter of 1984, in an abandoned air raid shelter in Bathgate, Scotland. Four kids with second-hand instruments and a borrowed four-track. By the end of that decade they were the most quietly worshipped band on the British indie circuit - played on the radio, courted by majors, and never quite famous enough to ruin themselves.

Goodbye Mr Mackenzie's story is one of the great what-ifs in modern music. A song called "The Rattler" should have made them stars. A debut album that took two years and three producers should have been a classic. Instead, the band fractured, regrouped, and fractured again, leaving a trail of gorgeous, ferocious records and a singer who would go on to front Garbage.

Open Your Arms is the first full account of how it happened — and how, against every reasonable expectation, the band found their way back to a stage in 2019 with the same line-up.

It is a book about songs and the people who write them. About the quiet violence of nearly making it. About memory, debt, and the long second act.