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I wouldn't start from here "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard

"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman

"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian

"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times

"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post

"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go

"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times

"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist

"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly

"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian

"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review

"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT

"A joy."
- Financial Times

"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman

"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald

"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust

"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM

"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times

"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ

"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List

"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age

"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph

"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out

"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters

"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post

"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun

"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail

"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner

"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian

"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist

"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald

"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald

"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading

"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner

"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times

"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser

Rock & Hard Places "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers

"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle

"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm

"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser

"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press

"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald

"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune


Blazing Zoos "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus

"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut

"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK


About Andrew Mueller

Andrew Mueller is a Wagga Wagga-born, London-based rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist, pundit and author. He is a Contributing Editor at Monocle, and also writes more or less regularly for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Financial Times, Esquire, The Guardian, The Times, Uncut, High Life, Harper's Bazaar, The New Humanist, The Quietus, Australian Gourmet Traveller, eMusic and travelintelligence.net. Mueller has no real idea why he’s writing all this in the third person, unless it’s out of some desperate, deluded hope that it will sound like he can afford staff, or command the loyalty of starry-eyed interns. Anything else just seems kind of gauche, though, so he will stick with it.

He is the author of "Rock & Hard Places", an anthology of rock journalism, foreign correspondence and travel writing first published in 1999, then reissued in updated form in 2010, and of "I Wouldn't Start From Here", a history of the 21st century as seen from most of the places in which the 21st century has, thus far, happened, which was published in various territories between 2007 and 2009. He recommends both these books unreservedly, but then he would.

Andrew Mueller was Reviews Editor at lamented rock weekly Melody Maker between 1991 and 1993, and has been freelance ever since. He wrote a fortnightly opinion column for Time Out between 2002 and 2004, and the “Bad Idea Of The Week” column, a regular study of human folly, for The Independent On Sunday Review between 2004 and 2006. As of June 2008, a variation on this theme, “Moment Of Madness”, appears weekly in the Financial Times Magazine. He also appears sometimes, if not nearly often enough for his liking, on radio and television.

Among various misadventures in more than 70 countries, Andrew Mueller has reported on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the lifting of the siege of Bihac, the handover of Hong Kong, the invasion of Iraq, the wartime rock’n’roll scene of Sarajevo, an Elvis Presley festival in Tupelo and Ukraine’s efforts to launch Chernobyl as a tourist destination. He was probably the first foreigner ever to set foot in the village of Panggi in Arunachal Pradesh, north-eastern India, and certainly the first to take a wicket on the village cricket pitch (caught behind off a thickish outside edge). He has ridden the Cresta Run, driven the proverbial Road to Damascus, been given a guided tour of Lebanon by Hizbollah, travelled the Trans-Mongolian railway, patrolled Basra with the Welsh Guards and Kabul with the Royal Anglian Regiment, played the country songwriters’ open-mic night at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, and flown the world’s least commercially sane air route - IranAir between Tehran and Caracas. In November 2005, he was briefly an extremely minor international news story, after getting arrested in Cameroon while travelling with an illegal separatist group, and finding himself obliged to spend the weekend in gaol.

Andrew Mueller has interviewed a bemusing panoply of public figures, including Libyan heir apparent Saif Gaddafi, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, Loyalist hitman turned surrealist painter Michael Stone, UN High Representative to Bosnia-Hercegovina Paddy Ashdown, British MPs George Galloway and Boris Johnson, UK cabinet ministers Peter Hain and Geoff Hoon, long-imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier, Tirana mayor Edi Rama, Israeli dissident Mordechai Vanunu, supermodel Helena Christensen, Abkhazian president Sergei Bagapsh, Muslim Council of Britain chairman Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Cape Verde prime minister Jose Maria Neves, Renault Formula 1 team principal Flavio Briatore, former MI5 Director-General Dame Stella Rimington, renegade MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and former US Vice President Al Gore. He has also toured with some of the world’s biggest rock acts (U2, Radiohead, The Cure, Pearl Jam, The Prodigy) and interviewed any number of others.

Andrew Mueller was also a contributing editor to the fifth edition of Robert Young Pelton’s “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” (Harper Collins, 2003). Other author credits include chapters in “The Mammoth Book Of Sex, Drugs & Rock’n’Roll” (Constable Robinson, 2001), and Ariane Sherine's "The Atheist's Guide To Christmas" (The Friday Project, 2009). He has also written sleevenotes for Straitjacket Fits (“Straitjacket Fits”), The Go-Betweens (the “Spring Hill Fair” and “Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express” reissues, plus “Live In London”), The Fatima Mansions (the “Viva Dead Ponies” reissue), Microdisney (the “Daunt Square To Elsewhere” anthology) and programme notes for U2 (the “Vertigo” world tour). He concedes, however, that on balance it’s unlikely to get better than appearing in between Mozart and Muhammad in the index of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”.

Andrew Mueller has been twice shortlisted for the OneWorld Media Awards, once for the Travelex Travel Writers’ Awards, and is surprisingly unembittered about having won none of them.

When not impersonating various strains of journalist, Andrew Mueller is the singer and songwriter with The Blazing Zoos, an incipient alt.country phenomenon who released their debut album, "I'll Leave Quietly", in 2010. He is also co-proprietor of the Nashville-on-Thames country & western club.

Andrew can be contacted at mail@andrewmueller.net. He is especially keen to hear from commissioning editors with a budget and a sense of adventure or, failing that, impressionable heiresses whose fathers own newspapers.

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