How To Lose Friends and Irritate People

How To Lose Friends and Irritate People collects two darkly funny stories from Justin Pearson, founder of Three One G Records and member of The Locust, Retox, All Leather, Dead Cross and numerous other projects.

The book follows Pearson’s unlikely excursions into electronic music after being recruited as a vocalist by The Bloody Beetroots and Designer Drugs, ostensibly lending a little punk credibility to their respective projects. What follows is considerably less glamorous.

Pearson recounts being forced to lip-sync in front of thousands at Australian festivals, enduring a disastrous music-video shoot in the Pennsylvania woods, and repeatedly questioning both the motives of the people around him and his own reasons for being there. Told with his characteristically dry, confrontational humor, the stories explore the collision between DIY punk ethics, underground music and commercial entertainment.

The book combines the previously separate stories “Now I Will Make a Sound For You to Hear, A Sound Without My Mouth” and “A Sucker Is Born Every Minute” into a single volume.

This edition also includes a flexi postcard record, turning the book into equal parts memoir, punk artifact and physical-media rejection of the increasingly digital world it documents.