London's Burning is the story of punk rock as it happened, stripped of hindsight and future legend, and laid bare. Here are the Damned and the Adverts on tour, the Sex Pistols swearing through their prime-time television debut, the Tom Robinson Band conducting a club full of skinheads through the anthem "Glad to Be Gay," rioting Rastas running through the carnage that closed the Notting Hill Carnival, Sid Vicious arguing about which was David Bowie's best song. At the same time, i...

By 1987, David Bowie was at a creative, critical, and commercial low. His most recent album was dismissed by the music press, his latest tour written off as a disaster. Fifteen years after becoming the most colourfully controversial superstar in recent rock history, Bowie was seen as a spent force.Almost twenty years later, Bowie has re-established himself at the very peak of his profession in one of the most extraordinary comebacks in rock history. His 1995 release of the critical...

Jeff Beck stands alongside fellow ex-Yardbirds Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton as one of the greatest electric guitarists Britain has ever produced. His work in the past three decades has encompassed progressive, soul, jazz-rock and instrumental music, winning him the accolade of 'the guitarist's guitarist' from innumerable musicians' magazines. Yet despite his eclectic output and many collaborators, fans and critics alike hark back to the short-lived Jeff Beck Group of the late 1960s, featuri...

The films that society has termed pornographic movies have been with us for over a century now, since the first flickering kinetoscopes stumbled into life in 1889. Yet beyond a handful of scholarly tracts, and a few glancing references in certain Hollywood histories, there is no modern history of the subject available. Black and White and Blue fills that void. Taking as its cut-off point the late 1970s, when the advent of the home VCR irrevocably changed the face of the adult film industry...

Offering a unique analysis and discussion of her life, career, and work, this is the true story of Patti Smith. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant American artists of the rock age, an acclaimed poet, and a figurehead for many liberal political causes, Patti Smith went from an ugly-duckling childhood in postwar New Jersey to become queen of the 1970s New York art scene. Not a tell-all biography, this measured, accurate, and enthusiastic account of Smith's career is written f...

A veteran music journalist explores rock-n-roll's bayou roots in "a jolting 18-track joy ride [that] unlocks secrets and back-stories worth savoring" ( The Wall Street Journal).The bayou of the American south—stretching from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama—is a world all its own, with a rich cultural heritage that has had an outsized influence on musicians across the globe. In this unique study of marsh music, Dave Thompson goes beyond the storied stomp...

A radical religion dismantles democracy, changing America forever.Some citizens fight to keep their civil liberties......but the doom preachers aim to extinguish all hope, no matter who must die.Thirty interconnected stories illustrate a hellish vision of the future. The Church of the American Way, a criminal supergroup claiming to have God on their payroll, commits endless atrocities against humanity. Leaders...

On Halloween night 1983, at an ROTC dance on a college campus deep in the heart of Vermont, the band subsequently known as Phish played their very first gig.It was a total disaster.But it was the beginning of an era. Here's the whole story.

Dave Thompson, author of Virgin's acclaimed Red Hot Chili Peppers biography, takes a new and very detailed look at the creation of one of the world's most influential bands. After all the streets of London had been covered in 'Clapton Is God' tributes, the three top rock instrumentalists of their time, all stars in their own right, came together to form Cream. Cream went on to become the first band to break openthe lucrative US market by dint of their live shows alone.Updat...

“The Wall was Roger Waters's first album.” So begins Dave Thompson's Thompson's Roger Waters: The Man Behind the Wall, the first full biography on this notoriously guarded personality that has eluded probing queries and papertrail dissection for the entirety of his career. As he prepares to release his first solo album in twenty-five years, buff up on your Waters know-how with the paperback edition of Thompson's incisive profile, first published in 2013.Born in 19...

Get on the vinyl train and learn about this captivating hobbyVinyl Record Collecting For Dummies teaches you how to start a collection, grow your collection, and make that collection sound excellent. You’ll learn how to shop for new, used, and rare records, and how to select the turntable that’s right for you. Learn how to determine a record’s value, build your collection on a budget, and properly store and maintain your records. This handy Dummies guide a...

When it comes to earthshaking songs—the ones that signal a tectonic shift in the current musical landscape—there is “Johnny B. Goode” . . . there is “Good Vibrations” . . . and there is "I Feel Love." A disco touchstone recorded by Donna Summer in 1976 and released on her fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday, in 1977, "I Feel Love" is one of the most important records in music history, and one of the most influential."I Feel Love" topped charts the world over—including in the U...