Showing 25–36 of 80 resultsSorted by latest
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£25.00
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.
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£25.00
Abbey Road studios has partnered with music journalist David Hepworth to write the story of Abbey Road as never told before. Featuring interviews with artists, producers and sound engineers, transcripts, photographs, and much more, this is the story of how the first purpose built recording studio would become a phenomenon.
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£25.00
In 1970, pop was in trouble. The Beatles were no more. Pink Floyd gave up on singles altogether. Led Zeppelin dismissed anything beyond their ‘musical statements’ as childish frippery. Thankfully, help was on its way. This comprehensive chronicle by music historian Will Hodgkinson explores how an unlikely mix of backroom songwriters, revitalised rockers, actors, producers, teen stars and children turned pop into the dominant sound and vision of the 1970s. While bands such as the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were ruling the albums chart, the singles chart was swinging along to the tune of million-selling blockbusters by the likes of Brotherhood of Man, the Sweet and the Wombles. These were the songs you heard on Radio 1, on Saturday-night TV, at youth clubs, down the pub and even emanating from your parents’ record player.
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£12.99
MusicQuake presents a history of popular music focusing on the most rebellious and game-changing recordings and performances from the early twentieth century to today.
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£20.00
Peter Doherty’s is the last of the great rock ‘n’ roll stories. As an icon, he is on par with the early Rolling Stones and Sid Vicious – bad boy and public enemy. To his devoted fans, he is a cult hero, a modern-day Rimbaud. Musically, there is no doubt he has defined the past twenty years of British rock ‘n’ roll with his sound, lyrics, lifestyle and aesthetic. Since The Libertines rose to international fame, Doherty has proved endlessly fascinating. A whirlwind of controversy and scandal has tailed him since his first spell in prison in 2003. He divides critics; for every award and accolade, there is a scathing review. All too often his talents as a songwriter and performer have been over-looked. Hard drugs, tiny gigs on the hoof, huge stadium shows, collaborations, gangsters, and groupies, Doherty has led a life of huge highs and incredible lows. In this book, Doherty explores his darkest moments.
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£20.00
On 12 July 1962, the Rollin’ Stones performed their first-ever gig at London’s Marquee jazz club. Down the line, a ‘g’ w as added, a spark was lit and their destiny was sealed. No going back. Lesley-Ann Jones’s new history tracks this contradictory, disturbing, granitic and unstoppable band through hope, glory and exile, into the juggernaut years and beyond into rock’s ongoing reckoning, where the Stones seem more at odds than ever with the values and heritage against which they have always rebelled.
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£20.00
We all have a random collection of the things that made us – photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story and ask him some awkward questions: Who do you think you are? Are clothes important? Why are there so many pairs of broken glasses up here? From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley’s Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis’s unique life, Pulp, 20th century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he’d rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process – writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.
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£20.00
Bryan Ferry’s evocative lyrics of aspiration and romantic longing, introduced by the author and published on the 50th anniversary of the first Roxy Music album. Bryan Ferry’s work as a singer and songwriter, both as a solo artist and with Roxy Music, is legendary. ‘Lyrics’ collects the words written for music across seventeen albums, from the first iconic Roxy album of 1972 via the masterpiece of Avalon to 2014’s Avonmore, introduced by the author. As he writes in his preface, ‘The low points in life so often produce the most keenly felt and best loved songs.’ And, it might be added, some of the best poetry.
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£30.00
Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies. The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes, and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago – but so much remains the same.
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£20.00
Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience – and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In ‘Rock Concert’, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there. Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock’s stratospheric rise.
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£75.00
In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career – from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs’ lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney’s personal archive – drafts, letters, photographs – never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
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£35.00
‘Renegades’ is a candid, revealing, and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen that explores everything from their origin stories and career-defining moments to their country’s polarized politics and the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality. Filled with full-colour photographs and rare archival material, it is a compelling and beautifully illustrated portrait of two outsiders – one Black and one white – looking for a way to connect their unconventional searches for meaning, identity, and community with the American story itself.