If failure and rejection are inevitable in life, so too are our attempts, once the pain has dulled, to rationalise them, to say that if this person, or that large corporation, hadn’t broken my heart, then I wouldn’t be here, in my full majesty, in this town, with this person, or that employer. A section of the self-help industry, led by Elizabeth Day’s books and How to Fail podcast, is devoted to valorising this impulse through greeting-card aphorisms and “teachable moments”, insisting that failure is but a staging post to ultimate success.
Failure is also at the heart of Jamie Collinson’s The Rejects, a collection of pen portraits of people who have been sacked from pop groups and bands, starting with the most famous reject of all, Pete Best, removed as the Beatles’ drummer before they became global stars. Collinson argues that such figures offer a perspective “from both the inside and outside” that is “uniquely revealing”. Out of this loose premise he has fashioned a baggy, digressive book that, like many of its subjects, gets by more on charm than finesse. Along the way, he also holds good to his subtitle and offers an alternative history of pop and insights into the form’s enduring appeal. Teachable moments are, thankfully, in short supply.
Content from our partners
