I Am Dogboy

Karl Hyde FABER & FABER. £28

Underworld linchpin’s online diary anthologised.

For an artist who documents urban chaos via fragmentary collaging of random words, photographs and design, the internet proved a perfect outlet for Karl Hyde, parallel to his band’s trancey tech-pop. Since ’99, he’s been a daily diarist thereon, and here assembles the highlights into something surprisingly close to an autobiography, interspersed with desolate snaps and, at the foot of each page, song titles, which cleverly plant a playlistcum-soundtrack in the reader’s head. From childhood perceptions of the rhythm of traffic while growing up beside the A456 in Worcestershire, right through to rats getting into the binbags outside Bristol Colston Hall, the observational voice of Underworld is present and correct. But there’s a selfrevealing one, too, belonging to Hyde the fanboy, ecstatic at breaking into pop’s magical kingdom, yet insecure at rubbing shoulders with giants while touring in Blondie’s backing band. In those passages, he is eloquent and touching.