The only book to consider Oi! as a distinct genre within punk rock, What Have We Got? is the story of a musical movement that became a national concern in the eighties and still divides opinion today. Drawing on new interviews with Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Crown Court, Lion’s Law, The Templars and many more, Simon Spence considers the genre’s inception and noble intentions, how it fell into infamy, and where it lies now. With a growing and formidable audience in the US, ...

Steve Marriott, lead singer of the Small Faces and Humble Pie, had a voice coveted by Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey and David Bowie, amongst many others. All or Nothing, Simon Spence's oral history biography, is drawn from over 125 interviews with those who knew Marriott intimately: his wives, children, bandmates and closest friends, managers, record producers, record label bosses and his fellow musicians. Included are scores of people who have never told their story before. From ...

The definitive story of The Stone Roses by Simon Spence, with an updated final chapter covering the reunion rollercoaster ride.From the Manchester backwaters to the worldwide 2012 tour, War and Peace lays bare the irresistible tale of the last of the great bands..Based on 400 hours of interviews with over seventy of The Stone Roses' closest associates, including six former band members, War and Peace is the first major biography of t...

‘We didn’t know what the film was about. We didn’t know there was a conflict of image that could perhaps hurt us later on. It sort of grew, blew out of proportion.’ BARRY GIBBIn the late 70s, The Bee Gees spectacularly revived their career and, with their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, became the biggest disco group in the world. But when the disco boom crashed, they went from icons to punch lines overnight. The band was inescapably frozen in...

What happened to the Bay City Rollers is one of the greatest scandals in music industry. When The Screaming Stops reveals the dark truth behind 'rollermania', the pioneering boy band fad which gripped the UK in the seventies, exposing the sinister undercurrents which underpinned the band's phenomenal success.Dazzled by sudden global fame and under the grip of their Svengali manager Tom Paton, the Bay City Rollers descended into a world of depravity, victimhood, cri...

Peter Doherty's is the last of the great rock 'n' roll stories - bad boy and public enemy. To his devoted fans, he is a cult hero, a modern-day Rimbaud. Musically, he has defined the past twenty years of indie rock 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 ever since the early 2000s, so much so that all too often his talents as a son...

Peter Doherty's is the last of the great rock 'n' roll stories - bad boy and public enemy. To his devoted fans, he is a cult hero, a modern-day Rimbaud. Musically, he has defined the past twenty years of indie rock 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 ever since the early 2000s, so much so that all too often his talents as a son...

The powerful story of two siblings struggling to endure extreme poverty, by the author of the multi-award-winning, BOY 87.Lola's life is about to become unrecognisable. So is Lola. Everything used to be comfortable. She lived in a big house with her family, where her biggest problems were arguing with her little brother or being told she couldn't have a new phone. But as one disaster follows another, the threads of her home and family begin to unravel. Cut off from everything she h...

At the height of his initial, turn-of-the-1990's infamy as the maraca-wielding dancer with 'Madchester' giants Happy Mondays, the pop-eyed Mark Berry, forever known to the world as Bez, was visibly a danger to society. He became the so-called Chemical Generation's bug-eyed pied piper, every weekend leading millions out to oblivion and beyond, as they adopted his E-gobbling party lifestyle.Neither an accomplished musician nor even a very good dancer, Bez was a prime candidate for fl...

The extraordinary life and times of Carl Barat, Libertine.READ BY CARL BARAT!READ BY CARL BARAT. From his childhood in suburban Basingstoke, through times of literally being down and out in London and Paris, to success as one of the co-founders of one of Britain's most revered bands, Carl Barat has gone through the glass darkly as bands fell apart around him, friendships faltered and egos and hedonism threatened to pull his life apart.Untitled Autobiography tells his...

Robert Twigger, poet and travel author, was in search of a new way up England when he stumbled across the Great North Line. From Christchurch on the South Coast to Old Sarum to Stonehenge, to Avebury, to Notgrove barrow, to Meon Hill in the midlands, to Thor's Cave, to Arbor Low stone circle, to Mam Tor, to Ilkley in Yorkshire and its three stone circles and the Swastika Stone, to several forts and camps in Northumberland to Lindisfarne (plus about thirty more sites en route). A single dea...

'A great writer' 'A music journalist of integrity' **'**There's only one Ted Kessler!'Paul Weller Billy Childish Liam GallagherPaper Cuts is the inside story of the slow death of the British music press. But it's also a love letter to it, the tale of how music magazines saved one man's life. Ted Kessler left home and school around his seventeenth birthday, determined 'to be someone who listened to music professional...