“Well, well,” said the Rocking Chair
£20.00Songbook of Dean Friedman’s classic 1978 album, “Well, Well,” Said the Rocking Chair. Includes chart hits, Lydia, Lucky Stars, Rocking Chair and more.
100 Funk Grooves for Electric Bass
£14.99100 Funk Grooves for Electric Bass is your complete guide to mastering the essential skills of funk bass groove. From old school to new, Funk has never gone away, because it’s all about the groove. Here, Dan Hawkins teaches what you can learn from the funk bass players who laid down the story of funk on thousands of deep cuts.
A Musician’s Guide to Surviving the Great Recession
£11.00Practical tips for living a truly better life in a precarious economy:
Live better on less and have more fun doing it! This book offers hardcore, real-world, practical advice on how anyone can survive in a precarious economy. Learn useful tips and creative strategies, from a hardworking musician who, like most professional musicians, knows, from hard-won experience, how to not only keep the annoying wolf from the door, but how to give him a painful wedgie, so he’ll finally give up and leave you the f*&k alone.
Absolute Beginners: Acoustic Guitar
£9.99The complete guide to playing the Acoustic Guitar from the first time you pick it up all the way to playing your first songs along with backing tracks.
Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game
£4.00As known for her fraught personal life as her chart-topping songs, Amy Winehouse who died at the age of 27 in July 2011 was one of the most compelling vocalists in the world. But despite this fact, it was her self-destructive excesses that made headlines. Drinking binges, self-harm, eating disorders, drug abuse, and a turbulent marriage overshadowed her music even as her record sales soared, and the media watched eagerly as Amy’s world imploded. This richly illustrated biography tells her story in full, from childhood through to the pleasures and pains of superstardom, her blazing talent, the years she lost to her addictions, the final days before her death, and the legacy of her raw and heartfelt music.
Anchored In Love
£5.00‘Anchored in Love’ is an inside look into the life of June Carter Cash, through the eyes of her only child with Johnny Cash – John Carter Cash. With skillful prose, he reveals new information about the legendary woman through his tender memories and heartwarming stories.
Another Side of Bob Dylan
£14.00 – £18.00A vivid, first-hand account of Nobel Prize-winning singer and songwriter Bob Dylan as an artist, friend, and celebrity, illustrated with never-before-seen photographs, and told by an engaging raconteur who cut his own swathe through the turbulent counterculture.
August 2014 marks 50 years since Bob Dylan released his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. Recorded in one night, in the middle of a turbulent year in his life, the music marked a departure from Dylan’s socially-conscious folk songs and began his evolution toward other directions.
During the years they spent together, few people outside of Dylan’s immediate family were closer than Victor Maymudes, who was Dylan’s tour manager, personal friend, and travelling companion from the early days in 1960s Greenwich Village through the late 90’s. Another Side of Bob Dylan recounts landmark events including Dylan’s infamous motorcycle crash; meeting the Beatles on their first US tour; his marriage to Sara Lownds, his romances with Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, and others; fellow travelers Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Wavy Gravy, Dennis Hopper, The Band, The Traveling Wilburys, and more; memorable concerts, and insights on Dylan’s songwriting process.
On January 26th, 2001, after recording more than 24 hours of taped memories in preparation for writing this book, Victor Maymudes suffered an aneurysm and died. His son Jacob has written the book, using the tapes to shape the story.
A Los Angeles Times Best Seller.
Being Elvis: A Lonely Life
Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and traditionally black rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which simply blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America.
In Being Elvis veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world’s most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way.
Intimate and unsparing, Being Elvis explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, ultimately offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.
Belle and Sebastian: Illustrated Lyrics
£20.00A beautiful collaboration between Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch and illustrator Pamela Tait: a unique visual reinterpretation of Murdoch’s favourite Belle and Sebastian songs.
From the imagined lives of the passengers riding Glasgow buses in the early 1990s to questions raised about the status quo and musings on the meaning of religion, Stuart Murdoch, frontman of Scottish indie pop band Belle and Sebastian, has written some of the most captivating lyrics of the past two decades. Belle and Sebastian recorded their first critically acclaimed album Tigermilk in three days, played a sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic, and famously forgot their drummer, dressed in his pyjamas, outside a Walmart. Their songs have animated many film soundtracks, developing a cult following that has helped to define the sound of indie music as we know it today.
The first book in the ‘Illustrated Lyrics’ series combines the words selected from over twenty-four years of Belle and Sebastian songs with specially commissioned illustrations from Scottish artist Pamela Tait, whose intricate and whimsical character illustrations Stuart Murdoch stumbled upon and fell in love with when he rediscovered old fan mail Pamela had sent to him over a decade ago. Set with expressive typography, this is an exceptional publication that will seduce even the most devoted fans to ‘see’ these wonderful songs afresh.
Birth School Metallica Death
£9.90Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world’s biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock ‘n’ roll sagas.
No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group’s history and an insiders’ view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band’s limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet’s ‘HQ’ outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.
Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band’s inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.
Boy About Town: A Memoir
£8.00As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history.
Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity.
Featuring a vibrant cast of supporting characters (from school friends to rock stars), and built up from notebooks, diaries, interviews, letters, and issues of his now legendary fanzine Jamming!, Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.
Brutally Honest
£9.50The tell-all memoir from the loudest, proudest Spice Girl – and the truth behind the headlines
As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.k.a Scary Spice, has been an international star since her twenties. Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success.With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free.
Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop
£4.99Has the global phenomenon that is Pop Idol completely ruined pop music, or is it just the natural revolution of a genre of music that has always been manufactured? From Tin Pan Alley via The Monkees and finally to boy bands, this is the complete history of the most successful genre of music ever. Manufactured acts have been the money-spinning mainstay of the pop industry for decades. Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop takes a decade-by-decade look at some of the music industry’s more cynical creations from the 1950s to the 21st century, encompassing acts such as The Monkees, The Bay City Rollers and The Spice Girls, as well as the phenomenon that is Pop Idol and its siblings.
This revealing study includes interviews with the movers and shakers of the pop world and the artistic armies behind their successes, including Chinn and Chapman, Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Simon Fuller, Paula Abdul and Cathy Dennis. The result is a comprehensive look back at some of the fly-by-nights of pop and a DIY guide to becoming a pop star, listing the dos and don’ts of making it in the pop music industry.
Bunnyman: A Memoir
£20.00Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and ’70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War.
From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool’s punk club, Eric’s, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents’ council estate house, and to finding a community – friends, enemies and many in between – with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few.
It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like ‘Lips Like Sugar,’ ‘The Cutter’ and ‘The Killing Moon’. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.
Cover Versions: Singing Other People’s Songs
£4.00Back in pop’s early days, every record was a cover version. Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were famous for interpreting other people’s songs, and the closest Elvis Presley ever got to writing one was when his manager, Colonel Parker, arm-twisted the rights away from the original songwriters. The balance of power shifted when The Beatles and the Stones wrote all their own material, yet the great tradition of the cover version never died. In this elegantly-tooled volume, Adam Sweeting gets the lowdown on cover versions – the worst, the most popular, the most frequently recorded, the most successful, the stupidest, the most tasteless, the most influential, and the ones nobody got around to yet.
Cuba: Music and Revolution
£35.00The first ever book about Cuban record sleeve design, compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, Cuba: Music and Revolution , when Cuba’s Special Period, brought about by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Russia’s financial support for the Cuban government, led to the demise of vinyl-record manufacturing in Cuba. The artwork here reflects both the cultural and musical depth of Cuba as well as the political influence of revolutionary communism.
Over the past century, Cuban music has produced a seemingly endless variety of styles―rumba, mambo, son, salsa―at a dizzyingly fast rate. Since the 1940s a steady stream of Cuban musicians has also made the migration to the US, sparking changes in North American musical forms: bandleader Machito set New York’s jazz and Latin scene on fire, and master drummer Chano Pozo’s entry into Dizzy Gillespie’s group led to the birth of Latin jazz, to name just two.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the new government closed American-owned nightclubs and consolidated the island’s recording industry under a state-run monopoly. Out of this new socialist agenda came new musical styles, including the Nueva Trova movement of left-wing songwriters. The 1980s saw more experimentation in modernist jazz, salsa and Afro-Cuban folkloric music.
Generously illustrated with hundreds of colour images, Cuba: Music and Revolution presents the history of Cuban record cover art, including many examples previously unseen outside the island itself.
Ed Sheeran for Easy Guitar
£16.98A dozen songs from this contemporary British pop singing & strumming star: ‘The A Team’, ‘All of the Stars’, ‘Don’t’, ‘Give Me Love’, ‘I See Fire’, ‘I’m a Mess’, ‘Kiss Me’, ‘Lego House’, ‘Photograph’, ‘Sing’, ‘Tenerife Sea’ and ‘Thinking Out Loud’.
First 50 Rock Songs: You Should Play on Electric Guitar
£14.99A great collection of 50 rock standards including tab, chords, and lyrics. Songs include ‘Iron Man’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Everybody Hurts’, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Beat It’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and ‘Ticket To Ride’.
Foo Fighters – Easy Guitar with Tab
£15.9915 easier guitar arrangements with lyrics of Foo Fighters favorites: All My Life * Best of You * Big Me * Everlong * I’ll Stick Around * Learn to Fly * Long Road to Ruin * Monkey Wrench * My Hero * The Pretender * Rope * These Days * This Is a Call * Times like These * Walk.
Friday on my Mind
£14.99George Young wasn’t so much on the charts for the best part of three decades: he and his musical partner Harry Vanda were the charts.
George’s journey began with the trailblazing Easybeats and continued, alongside Harry, as producer/songwriter for hire with John Paul Young, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, Cheetah, Ted Mulry, Stevie Wright and, most crucially, AC/DC. George and Harry also struck gold with Flash and the Pan, almost by accident.
George Young helped create such classics as ‘Friday on My Mind’, ‘Sorry’, ‘Love is in the Air’, ‘Evie’, ‘Yesterday’s Hero’, ‘Down Among the Dead Men’, ‘Hey, St. Peter’, ‘Bad Boy for Love’, ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’. In 2001, APRA voted ‘Friday on My Mind’ the best and most significant Australian song of the past 75 years.
In this long-overdue book, the first to focus exclusively on the life and work of George Young, writer Jeff Apter explores George’s long and fruitful association with Harry; his rare ability to maintain a stable married life with his wife Sandra; and his handshake deal with Ted Albert that helped create a music empire. The book also reveals such little-known events as the accident that almost killed off ‘Hey, St. Peter’ before its release, and the tragedy that bonded George and Harry for life.
God’s Lonely Men
£9.99Pete Haynes was the drummer and founder of the cult punk band The Lurkers. Here, he charts their rise from playing in West London pubs and clubs to appearing on Top of the Pops. Then they came down with a crash. This tell-all insider’s look at the 70s punk scene mixes brutal humour with a sharp critique of the human condition from the point of view of a working class man. Haynes share his experience with The Sex Pistols, The Clash and many more classic bands and writes about what punk was really about.
Grammar Free in the UK: The Lockdown Letters
£12.99Bonkers correspondence to and rom UK punk artists during 2020. Whimsical and comical by turns, it features lots of the late 70’S/early 80’S punk bands including Cock Sparrer, Angelic Upstarts, Red Alert, The Blitz, Screaming Dead, Gonads, Zips and Those Naughty Lumps.
Hal Leonard Guitar Method – Brazilian Guitar
£16.98This book uses popular Brazilian songs to teach you the basics of the Brazilian Guitar style and technique. Learn to play in the styles of Joao Gilberto, Luiz Bonfá, Baden Powell, Dino Sete Cordas, Joao Basco and many others.
Hal Leonard Guitar Method – Folk Guitar
£15.99This collection features 31 of Sting’s definitive hits, including: ‘Brand New Day’, ‘Englishman in New York’, ‘Fields of Gold’, ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ and many more.
Hal Leonard Guitar Method – Jazz Guitar
£21.99Featuring in-depth lessons and 40 great jazz classics, the Hal Leonard Jazz Guitar Method is your complete guide to learning jazz guitar. Songs include: ‘Satin Doll’, ‘Take the A Train’, ‘Billie’s Bounce’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Bluesette’ and more.
Hal Leonard Guitar Method – Rockabilly
£18.98This book teaches the techniques, licks, chords, scales and strums you need to play rockabilly guitar. It shows you how to play rhythm & lead for all kinds of rockabilly grooves, in the style of masters such as Carl Perkins, Brian Setzer, Cliff Gallup, Buddy Holly, Scotty Moore and others. Instead of learning exercises, you learn the classic rockabilly songs and solos that made the genre come together in the first place. The 58 audio tracks will help you catch the rhythms and nuances of the rockabilly style. Songs include: Be-Bop-A-Lula * Get Rhythm * Honey Don’t * Milk Cow Blues * No Particular Place to Go * Rock Around the Clock * Rock This Town * Susie-Q * Train Kept A-Rollin’ * and more!
I & I: The Natural Mystics
£9.50The history of the original Wailers — Tosh, Livingstone and Marley — as never before told.
Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers — one of the most influential groups in popular music.
One of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines for the first time the story of the Wailers. It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, illuminating why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer.
I Can See Your House From Here
£12.00Camel – I Can See Your House From Here (The Decca Record Company, 1979)
Kinks: Fifty Years on the Road
£7.50Follow the authoritative text charting a nostalgia-packed journey from when the band was formed in Muswell Hill North London, by brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies in 1964. This unique book features extensive interviews with former band members. The book also includes rare photographs and a review of every Kinks Album from 1964 with a complete track by track analysis.
Kitch
£10.99Combining life-writing with poetic prose, Anthony Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener.
The poet and musician Anthony Joseph met and spoke to Lord Kitchener just once, in 1984, when he found the calypso icon standing alone for a moment in the heat of Port of Spain s Queen’s Park Savannah, one Carnival Monday afternoon. It was a pivotal meeting in which the great calypsonian, outlined his musical vision, an event which forms a moving epilogue to Kitch, Joseph’s unique biography of the Grandmaster.
Lord Kitchener (1922 – 2000) was one of the most iconic and prolific calypso artists of the 20th century. He was one of calypso’s most loved exponents, an always elegantly dressed troubadour with old time male charisma and the ability to tap into the musical and cultural consciousness of the Caribbean experience. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post War Britain. In the process Kitch, as he was affectionally called, single handedly popularised the calypso in Britain.