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The music. The fashion. The nights. The people. The love. These are the threads that came together to make the Hacienda great. Celebrate the magic of the club that changed everything in this official book, told through evocative photographs and eye-witness accounts of the people who were there, from musicians, DJs and fashion designers to performers, clubbers and staff.
When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn’t happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. Using Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue – an album that shaped Key’s expectations of love – as her guide, she examines the unexpected life she has created for herself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.
A visual and cultural history of hip hop, charting its meteoric rise from underground trailblazer to global tastemaker
The first full-length biography of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ beloved roadie, assistant, confidant and friend
The career of celebrated photographer Kevin Cummins began on 29th June 1973 when, as a 19-year-old photography student, he photographed David Bowie. That image is now in the renowned photography collection of the V&A Museum and marked the beginning of Kevin Cummins’ four-decade-long visual chronicle of David Bowie’s remarkable career. This volume includes some of the best portraits of Bowie ever taken, the majority of which have never been published until now.
The memoir music fans have been waiting for. Half of one of the greatest creative partnerships in popular music, Bernie Taupin is the man who wrote the lyrics for Elton John, who conceived the ideas that spawned countless hits, and sold millions and millions of records. Together, they were a duo, a unit, an immovable object. Their extraordinary, half-century-and- counting creative relationship has been chronicled in biopics (like 2019’s Rocketman) and even John’s own autobiography, ‘Me’. But Taupin, a famously private person, has kept his own account of their adventures close to his chest, until now. Written with honesty and candour, ‘Scatterhot’ allows the reader to witness events unfolding from Taupin’s singular perspective, sometimes front and center, sometimes from the edge, yet always described vibrantly, with an infectious energy that only a vivid songwriter’s prose could offer.
Global icon
Six-time Grammy winner
Headline-maker
The most talented recording artist of her generation
As Margaret Thatcher prepared to enter 10 Downing Street, four bands born of punk – Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, the Cure and Magazine – found a way to distil the dissonance and darkness of the shifting decade into a new form of music. Pushing at the taboos the Sex Pistols had unlocked and dancing with the fetishistic, all will become global stars of goth. By the time Thatcher is cast out of office in 1990, the arrival of goth will have imprinted on the cultural landscape as much as the Iron Lady herself. Now, 40 years since its inception, Cathi Unsworth provides the first comprehensive overview of goth.
Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emin’s tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown’s ‘Loaded’ detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). This book is a cultural swipe of the decade from loungecore to the rise of New Labour, teasing all the relevant artistic strands through interviews with all the major protagonists and exhaustive re-evaluations of the important records of the year – ‘The Bends’ by Radiohead, ‘Grand Prix’ by Teenage Fanclub, ‘Maxinquaye’ by Tricky, ‘Different Class’ by Pulp, and ‘The Great Escape’ by Blur.
‘I was saying things in songs that female singers didn’t really say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up, yet I was very serious.’
Whether you suffer from loneliness or laziness, from bereavement or betrayal, a heartbreak or a mere hangover, here you’ll find the perfect piece of classical music to heal the heart, soothe the soul and cure the maladies of the modern world. Musician and writer Oliver Condy takes the role of musical physician, using his years of experience to prescribe remedies for all manner of ailments in the form of classical music. With more than 100 recommendations, ‘Symphonies for the Soul’ is filled with fascinating stories behind the pieces and composers selected, and how in their own unique ways they can nourish the spirit in times of need.
The 1980s were about big ideas writ large – new money, new style, gender fluidity, gay pride, attritional politics, the ‘special relationship’, nuclear fear, AIDS, cocaine, ecstasy, tabloid royalty, the rise of urban pop, and ultimately geopolitical chaos. Using a big narrative approach, Dylan Jones’ history of the decade in pop frames the decade through some of its most important and popular hits, choosing records which either epitomised their time, or ushered in a new cultural shift. Each year brought a new twist as technology shifted and genres snowballed, MTV reigned supreme and the story of pop became globalised. Subjective and idiosyncratic, this book takes us from downtown New York to post-industrial Manchester, in a widescreen attempt to weave together the stories, the songs and events that re-shaped music and society.
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