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Capturing the stark contrast of bursting artistic energy with the post-WWII city, London, Reign Over Me reveals why classic rock ‘n’ roll could only have been born in London. Original interviews with over ninety musicians and movers-and-shakers immerse readers in a generation of young hopefuls who would change the face of music forever.
In July 1999, Nina Simone gave a rare performance as part of Nick Cave’s Meltdown Festival. After the show, in a state of awe, Warren Ellis crept onto the stage, took her piece of chewed gum from the piano, wrapped it in her stage towel and put it in a Tower Records bag. The gum remained with him for twenty years; a sacred totem, his creative muse, growing in significance with every passing year. In 2019, Cave – his collaborator and great friend – asked Warren if there was anything he could contribute to display in his Stranger Than Kindness exhibition. Warren realised the time had come to release the gum. Here, we reflect on how something so small, and of little apparent significance, can form beautiful connections between people.
Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life – a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. From ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘A Clockwork Orange’, the ‘Iliad’ to the ‘Beano’, these were the publications that had fuelled his creativity and shaped who he was. In ‘Bowie’s Books’, John O’Connell explores this list in the form of one hundred short essays, each offering a perspective on the man, performer and creator that is Bowie, his work as an artist and the era that he lived in.
This unique anthology of artists’ record covers, from the 1950s to today includes more than 450 covers, tracing the interaction between music and the visual arts. Featured covers include Salvador Dalì’s skewered butterfly for Jackie Gleason and Banksy’s stenciled graffiti for Blur.
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.
The first hardback photobook celebrating London’s greatest record shops
The BBC Proms is the world’s biggest and longest-running classical music festival and one of the jewels in the crown for the BBC. Held every summer at the Royal Albert Hall in London, it is one of the strongest brand names in the music world and attracts a glittering array of artists and orchestras in over 100 concerts, talks, workshops and family events. Whether you’re a first-time visitor or an experienced Prommer, watching at home or listening on radio or online, ‘BBC Proms 2021’ will be an excellent companion to a remarkable summer of music.
‘The Artist’s Way’ provides a twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self. It aims to dispel the ‘I’m not talented enough’ conditioning that holds many people back and helps you to unleash your own inner artist. Its step-by-step approach enables you to transform your life, overcome any artistic blocks you may suffer from, including limiting beliefs, fear, sabotage, jealousy and guilt, and replace them with self confidence and productivity.
An accessible and inspiring guide by the pianist and writer James Rhodes, who promises that this book gives anyone with two hands, a piano or an electric keyboard and just 45 minutes a day, the tools they need to learn to play Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major in 6 weeks, even if they know nothing about music and have never even touched a piano before.
Formed in Birmingham in 1968, Judas Priest – with its distinctive twin-guitar sound, studs and leather image – became the archetypal heavy metal band of the 1980s. Iconic tracks like ‘Breaking the Law’, ‘Living after Midnight’ and ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Coming’ helped the band achieve huge success in America but, as popular as they’ve been over the past five decades, no one from the band has stepped out of the stage lights to tell their – or the band’s – story. Founding member K.K. Downing finally puts that to rest by providing a warts and all account of Judas Priest’s rollercoaster ride to rock stardom.
In a series of essays exploring her life, thoughts and opinions, this is the first time Lily has laid bare everything. ‘My Thoughts Exactly’ is an epic exploration of a messed up mind and a complex life. Beginning with her childhood isolation, to finding huge success in her career but ending up as alone as she once was, Lily questions everything she knew about herself, probing her life for answers to the question she has forever been trying to answer: Who Am I?
Brett Anderson came from a world impossibly distant from rock star success, and in this book he traces the journey that took him from a childhood as ‘a snotty, sniffy, slightly maudlin sort of boy raised on Salad Cream and milky tea and cheap meat’ to becoming founder and lead singer of Suede. Anderson grew up in Hayward’s Heath on the grubby fringes of the Home Counties. As a teenager he clashed with his eccentric taxi-driving father and adored his beautiful, artistic mother. He brilliantly evokes the seventies, the suffocating discomfort of a very English kind of poverty and the burning need for escape that it breeds. Anderson charts the shabby romance of creativity as he travelled the tube in search of inspiration, fuelled by Marmite and nicotine, and Suede’s rise from rehearsals in bedrooms, squats and pubs. And he catalogues the intense relationships that make and break bands as well as the loss of his mother.
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