Elvis Died For Somebody's Sins But Not Mine


Book Description

You cannot believe a word Mick Farren tells you!” John Lydon A literary life railing against the machine, in the company of Johnny Cash, Frank Zappa, Chuck Berry and more. Mick Farren has spent more than 4 decades in the thick of the culture wars as a commentator, activist, essayist, poet, performer, and rebel with multiple causes. A founding figure of the 60s underground press, he careered on through the London birth pangs of punk, the intoxicated madness of Lower Manhattan under Ronald Reagan, earthquakes and urban insurrection in LA. Here you'll meet Frank Zappa, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Gore Vidal, and steam open correspondence between the author and Pete Townshend.




Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands


Book Description

I can confirm that should you ever find yourself on stage playing the bass guitar with tree left hands, it is usually the one in the middle that is the real one. The other two are probably phantoms. Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands tells the story of one of the most influential, revered and ultimately demented British bands of the 1980s, Spacemen 3. In classic rock n roll style they split up on the brink of their major breakthrough. As the decade turned sour and acid house hit the news, Rugby's finest imploded spectacularly, with Jason Pierce (aka Jason Spaceman) and Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) going their separate ways. Here, Will Carruthers tells the whole sorry story and the segue into Spirtualised in one of the funniest and most memorable memoirs committed to the page.




Elvis Has Left the Building


Book Description

“An interesting look at how 1977 marked the explosion of punk alongside this heartbreaking (though not altogether surprising) loss of a legend” (USA Today). In the late 1970s, punk music was setting out to destroy everything Elvis Presley had come to represent. But punk couldn’t destroy The King himself—he had already done that, succumbing to his excesses at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Ever since, Elvis has permeated the world in ways that are bizarre and inexplicable: a pop icon while alive, he has become almost a religious icon in death, a modern-day martyr crucified on the wheel of drugs, celebrity culture, junk food, and sex. In Elvis Has Left the Building, Dylan Jones takes us back to those heady days around the time of his death and the simultaneous rise of punk. Evoking the hysteria and devotion of The King’s numerous disciples and imitators, Jones offers a uniquely insightful commentary on Elvis’s life, times, and outrageous demise. Recounting how the artist single-handedly changed the course of popular music and culture, he also delves deep into the cult of The King and reveals what Elvis’s death meant—and still means to us today. “I’m not sure punk would have existed without [Elvis]. In fact I’m not sure a lot of things would have existed without him. Dylan Jones is the right man to ponder such questions.” —Bono “A gripping tale of impossible success and terrible waste and lost beauty that veers from Memphis to Las Vegas and all the way to the broken backstreets of London.” —Tony Parsons, author of The Hanging Club




Ashes to Ashes


Book Description

A comprehensive exploration of the final four decades of David Bowie’s musical career—covering every song he wrote, performed, or produced In Ashes to Ashes, the ultimate David Bowie expert offers a song-by-song retrospective of the legendary pop star's musical career from 1976 to 2016. Starting with Low, the first of Bowie's Berlin albums, and finishing with Blackstar—his final masterpiece released just days before his death in 2016—each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song's creation, production, influences and impact.




Dancefloor-Driven Literature


Book Description

Almost as soon as 'club culture' took hold - during the UK's Second Summer of Love in 1988 - its sociopolitical impact became clear, with journalists, filmmakers and authors all keen to use this cultural context as source material for their texts. This book uses that electronic music subculture as a route into an analysis of these principally literary representations of a music culture: why such secondary artefacts appear and what function they serve. The book conceives of a new literary genre to accommodate these stories born of the dancefloor - 'dancefloor-driven literature'. Using interviews with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (1994), alongside other dancefloor-driven authors Nicholas Blincoe and Jeff Noon as case studies, the book analyzes three separate ways writers draw on electronic dance music in their fictions, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. It explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, and analyses what specific literary techniques they deploy to write lucidly and fluidly about the metronomic beat of electronic music and the chemical accelerant that further alters that relationship.




Rebel Rebel


Book Description

David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know. David Bowie remains mysterious and unknowable, despite 45 years of recording and performing. His legacy is roughly 600 songs, which range from psychedelia to glam rock to Philadelphia soul, from avant-garde instrumentals to global pop anthems. Rebel Rebel catalogs Bowie's songs from 1964 to 1976, examines them in the order of their composition and recording, and digs into what makes them work. Rebel Rebel is an in-depth look at Bowie's early singles and album tracks, unreleased demos, session outtakes and cover songs. The book traces Bowie's literary, film and musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting. It also shows how Bowie exploited studio innovations, and the roles of his producers and supporting musicians, especially major collaborators like Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. This book places Bowie's music in the context of its era. Readers will discover the links between Kubrick's 2001 and "Space Oddity"; how A Clockwork Orange inspired "Suffragette City". The pages are a trip through Bowie's various lives as a young man in Swinging London, a Tibetan Buddhist, a disillusioned hippie, a rock god, and a Hollywood recluse. With a cast of thousands, including John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Cher.




Gathering of the Tribe: Landscape


Book Description

It is clear that landscapes have long inspired the consciousness of creative artists. By way of quick introduction to the links between music and territories, the 1977 KPM 1191 library music LP features a suite of pieces with titles such as ‘Country Lanes’, ‘Passing Meadows’ and ‘Memory Lane’ composed by Johnny Pearson to express the different aspects of (mostly rural) landscapes. The pieces are interesting as they try to capture an immersive experience of being in a land by using sound. This is a process by which many of the composers in this volume hope to express the wonder and mystery of landscape through sound. The music has been made to express a variety of landscapes: rural and urban; real and imaginary. About the series: GATHERING OF THE TRIBE is an on-going series about the mysterious power of sound and tone, with each book devoted to reviewing records that reveal divine and cosmic laws, voyages to other worlds or use sound as a tool for transformation. While highly selective, the series offers a practical guide to the ultimate occult record collection. Rare album sleeves complement each review.




Punk Rock: So What?


Book Description

It's now over twenty years since punk pogo-ed its way into our consciousness. Punk Rock So What?brings together a new generation of academics, writers and journalists to provide the first comprehensive assessment of punk and its place in popular music history, culture and myth. The contributors, who include Suzanne Moore, Lucy OBrien, Andy Medhurst, Mark Sinker and Paul Cobley, challenge standard views of punk prevalent since the 1970s. They: * re-situate punk in its historical context, analysing the possible origins of punk in the New York art scene and Manchester clubs as well as in Malcolm McClarens brain * question whether punk deserves its reputation as an anti-fascist, anti-sexist movement which opened up opportunities for women musicians and fans alike. * trace punks long-lasting influence on comics, literature, art and cinema as well as music and fashion, from films such as Sid and Nancy and The Great Rock n Roll Swindle to work by contemporary artists such as Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas. * discuss the role played by such key figures as Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell, Malcolm McClaren, Mark E. Smith and Viv Albertine. Punk Rock Revisited kicks over the statues of many established beliefs about the meaning of punk, concluding that, if anything, punk was more culturally significant than anybody has yet suggested, but perhaps for different reasons.




The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music


Book Description

"The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music is a comprehensive, smartly-conceived volume that can take its place as the new standard reference in popular music. The editors have shown great care in covering classic debates while moving the field into new, exciting areas of scholarship. International in its focus and pleasantly wide-ranging across historical periods, the Handbook is accessible to students but full of material of interest to those teaching and researching in the field." - Will Straw, McGill University "Celebrating the maturation of popular music studies and recognizing the immense changes that have recently taken place in the conditions of popular music production, The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music features contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field. Every chapter is well defined and to the point, with bibliographies that capture the history of the field. Authoritative, expertly organized and absolutely up-to-date, this collection will instantly become the backbone of teaching and research across the Anglophone world and is certain to be cited for years to come." - Barry Shank, author of ′The Political Force of Musical Beauty′ (2014) The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music provides a highly comprehensive and accessible summary of the key aspects of popular music studies. The text is divided into 9 sections: Theory and Method The Business of Popular Music Popular Music History The Global and the Local The Star System Body and Identity Media Technology Digital Economies Each section has been chosen to reflect both established aspects of popular music studies as well as more recently emerging sub-fields. The handbook constitutes a timely and important contribution to popular music studies during a significant period of theoretical and empirical growth and innovation in the field. This is a benchmark work which will be essential reading for educators and students in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and cultural sociology.




MONDO 2000


Book Description