A Musician’s Guide to Surviving the Great Recession

Back 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.

The 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.