The Idea of Waste starts with the premise that waste is inevitable in human society. It explores how we have grappled with both the material reality and the spectre of this shape-shifting phenomenon throughout history – utilizing it, dreaming of overcoming it, yet never escaping it. John Scanlan investigates what waste is and why it seems to be intrinsic to human life, at every turn, in every age and epoch. He demonstrates how waste never disappears completely but rather only prol...

When rock 'n' roll burst into life in the 1950s the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad.In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades of cinema, television, music videos, advertising and YouTube. Along the way h...

‘I hate the word maturing,’ singer David Lee Roth once said. ‘I don't like the word evolving - or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.’ Examining Roth’s sentiment, Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock‘n’roll follows the band’s pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' - a state of mind and way of being that above al...

The explosive story of the Sex Pistols is now so familiar that the essence of what they represented has been lost in a fog of nostalgia and rock’n’roll cliché. In 1976 the rise of the Sex Pistols was regarded in apocalyptic terms, and the punks as visitors from an unwanted future bringing chaos and confusion.John Scanlan considers the Sex Pistols as the first successful art project of their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a vision born out of radical politics, boredom and his deep and un...

We know that as we get older, we may slowly lose more and more of our memory, and that this can impair our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we consider the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us to a future in which the limits of our memories become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both with and within it, as well as what it might mean for memory to bec...

Easy Riders, Rolling Stones delves into the history of twentieth-century American popular music to explore the emergence of ‘road music’. This music – blues, RnB and rock – took shape at pivotal moments in this history, made by artists and performers who were, in various ways, seekers of freedom. Whether journeying across the country, breaking free from real or imaginary confines or in the throes of self-invention, they incorporated their experiences into scores of songs about tra...

This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or ‘broken’ knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable.The author considers...

The basis for the new hit documentary 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything, now streaming on Apple TV+.A rollicking look at 1971 - the busiest, most innovative and resonant year of the 70s, defined by the musical arrival of such stars as David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Joni MitchellOn New Year's Eve, 1970, Paul McCartney told his lawyers to issue the writ at the High Court in London, effectively ending The Beatles. You might say ...

WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC PRIZEA GUARDIAN MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2015Award-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Jon Savage's monument to the year that shaped the future of global pop cultural history.In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas fomenting since the late 1950s reached boiling point, culminating in a year in which the transient pop moment burst forth. Exploring the canonical figur...

A mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many moreVan Morrison's Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. In his first book, acclaimed musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh unearths the album'...

Who knew that Paul McCartney originally referred to Yesterday as 'Scrambled Eggs' because he couldn't think of any lyrics for his heart-breaking tune? Or that Patti LaBelle didn't know what 'Voulez-vous couches avec moi ce soir?' actually meant?These and countless other fascinating back stories of some of our best-known and best-loved songs fill this book, a collection of the highly successful weekly The Life of a Song columns that appear in the FT Weekend every Saturday.

The Encyclopedia Of Popular Music is universally recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference work on popular music.This expanded 5th edition is an essential reference book for anyone who has a query about any aspect of 20th Century popular music, including rock, dance, rap and R&B, as well as blues, soul, country and folk.This is the most accurate and up-to-date popular music reference available in one volume.Over 3,000 entries, many of them comp...