I Am Dog Boy (Karl Hyde): Book (2016)

First published in 2016.

At the turn of the millennium, Karl Hyde began keeping a daily online diary on the Underworld website. Every day, he posted words and pictures from wherever he was in the world. Sometimes the words would be opaque, poetic, quizzical. At others, they’d be confessional and therapeutic, crystal clear recollections about Karl’s childhood, or the genesis of the various iterations of the band since the early ’80s.

I Am Dogboy collects together a hand picked selection of Karl’s diary entries from a decade and a half of posts, reworks and reframes them together into a partial narrative that takes the reader up to the release of the game changing dubnobasswithmyheadman via childhood experiments with sound, first rock’n’roll shows, meeting Rick in Cardiff, recording variously with Conny Plank and at Paisley Park, touring with Blondie and beginning the writing process that would inform the lyrics for a vast number of Underworld’s most loved songs. Although the accompanying pictures are seemingly unrelated to the text, they quickly form a steady rhythm of their own.  

I Am Dogboy is beautifully designed by John Warwicker (tomato, Freur) and offers a unique insight into the creative process of one half of Underworld.