Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the 70`s and 80`s to its resurgence in the 90`s and 00`s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades. Featuring Ira Robbins, Alex Segura, Mary E. Donnelly, Pat DiPuccio, John Borack, Dave Hill, Will Birch, S. W. Lauden, Jordan Oakes, Brian Vander Ark, Anne K. Ream & R. Clifton Spargo, Chip Jacobs, Bill DeMain, Thierry Cote, Doug Brod, Jim Lindberg, Balin Schneider, Mike Randle, Butch Walker, Andrea Warner, Paul Myers,and Rex Broome's

International Who's Who in Popular Music 2011 provides biographical details on some of the most talented and influential artists and individuals from the world of popular music. Now in its thirteenth edition, it includes over 7,000 biographies charting the careers and achievements of pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world and country artists throughout the world.
Key Features:

• each entry includes full biographical information: principal career details, recordings and compositions, honours and contact information where available
• spans the full range of the popular music industry, from rock to jazz and dance to country
• provides information on established names as well as up-and-coming artists
• a directory section provides details of music festivals, awards, organizations within the industry, and digital music sources
• for ease of reference, the book includes an index of music group members.

In one accessible volume the International Who's Who in Popular Music 2011 provides the most comprehensive collection of information on the most famous and influential people in the popular music industry.

"Sesali Bowen is poised to give Black feminism the rejuvenation it needs. Her trendsetting writing and commentary reaches across experiences and beyond respectability. I and so many Black girls still figuring out who they are in this world will gain so much from whatever she has to say."-Charlene A. Carruthers, activist and author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements "Sesali perfectly vocalizes the inner dialogue, and daily mantras needed to be a Bad Bitch."-Gabourey Sidibe, actor, director, and author of This is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare "A powerful call for a more inclusive and 'real' feminism."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Bowen writes from an authentic space for Black women who are often left out of feminist conversations due to respectability politics, but who are just as deserving of the same voice and liberation."-Booklist (starred review) From funny and fearless entertainment journalist Sesali Bowen, Bad Fat Black Girl combines rule-breaking feminist theory, witty and insightful personal memoir, and cutting cultural analysis for an unforgettable, genre-defining debut. Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop. Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience. Bad bitches: this one's for you.

From the first rap battles in Seattle's Central District to the Grammy stage, hip hop has shaped urban life and the music scene of the Pacific Northwest for more than four decades. In the early 1980s, Seattle's hip-hop artists developed a community-based culture of stylistic experimentation and multiethnic collaboration. Emerging at a distance from the hip-hop centers of New York City and Los Angeles, Seattle's most famous hip-hop figures, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Macklemore, found mainstream success twenty years apart by going directly against the grain of their respective eras. In addition, Seattle has produced a two-time world-champion breaking crew, globally renowned urban clothing designers, an international hip-hop magazine, and influential record producers. In Emerald Street, Daudi Abe chronicles the development of Seattle hip hop from its earliest days, drawing on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how the elements of hip hop-rapping, DJing, breaking, and graffiti-flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs. The result is a rich narrative of a dynamic and influential force in Seattle music history and beyond. Emerald Street was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.

*THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER* As seen on Apple TV - 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything The Sixties ended a year late - on New Year's Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney initiated proceedings to wind up The Beatles. Music would never be the same again. The next day would see the dawning of a new era. 1971 saw the release of more monumental albums than any year before or since and the establishment of a pantheon of stars to dominate the next forty years - Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Rod Stewart, the solo Beatles and more. January that year fired the gun on an unrepeatable surge of creativity, technological innovation, blissful ignorance, naked ambition and outrageous good fortune. By December rock had exploded into the mainstream. How did it happen? This book tells you how. It's the story of 1971, rock's golden year.

Founded by Gaz Mayall on July 3, 1980, Gaz's Rocklin Blues is an institution and London's longest running one-nighter club. This book is released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the club and features all the flyers and posters made for the night over the years, as well as photos, anecdotes and everything you wanted to know about this legendary and well-loved night.

Ever since Peter Gabriel fronted progressive rock band Genesis, from the late 1960s until the mid 1970s, journalists and academics alike have noted the importance of Gabriel's contribution to popular music. His influence became especially significant when he embarked on a solo career in the late 1970s. Gabriel secured his place in the annals of popular music history through his poignant recordings, innovative music videos, groundbreaking live performances, the establishment of WOMAD (the World of Music and Dance) and the Real World record label (as a forum for musicians from around the world to be heard, recorded and promoted) and for his political agenda (including links to a variety of political initiatives including the Artists Against Apartheid Project, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Now tour). In addition, Gabriel is known as a sensitive, articulate and critical performer whose music reflects an innate curiosity and deep intellectual commitment. This collection documents and critically explores the most central themes found in Gabriel's work. These are divided into three important conceptual areas arising from Gabriel's activity as a songwriter and recording artist, performer and activist: 'Identity and Representation', 'Politics and Power' and 'Production and Performance'.

This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naivety, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized. Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise.

Listening to popular music and watching television have become the two most common activities for postwar generations in Britain. From the experiences of programmes like Oh Boy! and Juke Box Jury, to the introduction of 24 hour music video channels, the number and variety of television outputs that consistently make use of popular music, and the importance of the small screen as a principal point of contact between audiences and performers are familiar components of contemporary media operation. Yet there have been few attempts to examine the two activities in tandem, to chart their parallel evolution, to explore the associations that unite them, or to consider the increasingly frequent ways in which the production and consumption of TV and music are linked in theory and in practice. This volume provides an invaluable critical analysis of these, and other, topics in newly-written contributions from some of Britain's leading scholars in the disciplines of television and/or popular music studies. Through a concentration on four main areas in which TV organises and presents popular music - history and heritage; performers and performances; comedy and drama; audiences and territories - the book investigates a diverse range of musical genres and styles, factual and fictional programming, historical and geographical demographics, and the constraints of commerce and technology to provide the first systematic account of the place of popular music on British television.

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

The term 'Popular Music' has traditionally denoted different things in France and Britain. In France, the very concept of 'popular' music has been fiercely debated and contested, whereas in Britain and more largely throughout what the French describe as the 'Anglo-saxon' world 'popular music' has been more readily accepted as a description of what people do as leisure or consume as part of the music industry, and as something that academics are legitimately entitled to study. French researchers have for some decades been keenly interested in reading British and American studies of popular culture and popular music and have often imported key concepts and methodologies into their own work on French music, but apart from the widespread use of elements of 'French theory' in British and American research, the 'Anglo-saxon' world has remained largely ignorant of particular traditions of the study of popular music in France and specific theoretical debates or organizational principles of the making and consuming of French musics. French, British and American research into popular music has thus coexisted - with considerable cross-fertilization - for many years, but the barriers of language and different academic traditions have made it hard for French and anglophone researchers to fully appreciate the ways in which popular music has developed in their respective countries and the perspectives on its study adopted by their colleagues. This volume provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on popular music and its study in France and the UK.

British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.

'My favourite moment is when I finish a song, that is the moment I cherish.' - Rod Temperton The Invisible Man tells the remarkable story of how Rod Temperton worked his way up from a Grimsby fish factory to become one of the most successful songwriters of all time. Born in Cleethorpes in 1949, Temperton embarked on a career in music with the funk band Heatwave, for whom he wrote the international hits 'Boogie Nights' and 'Always and Forever', before his songwriting talent caught the attention of Michael Jackson's legendary producer, Quincy Jones. For Jackson's Off the Wall album, Temperton penned both the hit 'Rock with You' and the album's title track. Three years later, he started work on what would become the best-selling album of all time - Michael Jackson's Thriller - writing three songs, including the now legendary title track. And yet despite collaborating with some of music's biggest stars, including Donna Summer and Michael McDonald, Temperton was famously reclusive and seldom gave interviews. Having enjoyed unprecedented access to the great man for his Sony Award-winning radio documentary on Temperton, Jed Pitman presents the fully updated, definitive story of one of music's most talented individuals.

PJ Harvey's performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing 'trouble'. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise 'disruption' and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. Abigail Gardner mixes feminist theory and critical models from film and video scholarship as a rich means of interrogating Harvey's work and redefining her disruptive strategies. The book presents a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it to cultural memory, precipitated by Gardner's claim that Harvey's performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity. Harvey's masquerades emerge from her conversations and renegotiations with both national and transatlantic musical, visual and lyrical heritages. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey's music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain's premier singer-songwriters. It extends the discussion on music video to consider how to make sense of the rapidly developing digital environment in which it now sits. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should attract readers from a range of subject areas including popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

This is the first of two titles by the Manic Street Preachers' bassist and lyricist, Nicky Wire. For more than twenty years and from Blackwood, Wales to Tokyo, Japan, Nicky Wire has kept a personal visual history of the band in their various stages from Generation Terrorists through Holy Bible and right up to last year's remarkable album, Postcards from a Young Man. Edited down from over 1,000 of Wire's personal polaroid's and with accompanying text by the man himself, Death of The Polaroid promises to be a rich, visual biography of one of the most loved and iconoclastic British bands of the past two decades.

London, 1820. The British capital is a metropolis that overwhelms dwellers and visitors alike with constant exposure to all kinds of sensory stimulation. Over the next two decades, the city's tumult will reach new heights: as population expansion places different classes in dangerous proximity and ideas of political and social reform linger in the air, London begins to undergo enormous infrastructure change that will alter it forever. It is the London of this period that editors Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford pinpoint in this book, which chooses one broad musical category--voice--and engages with it through essays on music of the streets, theaters, opera houses, and concert halls; on the raising of voices in religious and sociopolitical contexts; and on the perception of voice in literary works and scientific experiments with acoustics. Emphasizing human subjects, this focus on voice allows the authors to explore the multifaceted issues that shaped London, from the anxiety surrounding the city's importance in the musical world at large to the changing vocal imaginations that permeated the epoch. Capturing the breadth of sonic stimulations and cultures available--and sometimes unavoidable--to residents at the time, London Voices, 1820-1840 sheds new light on music in Britain and the richness of London culture during this period.

She's So Fine explores the music, reception and cultural significance of 1960s girl singers and girl groups in the US and the UK. Using approaches from the fields of musicology, women's studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies, this volume is the first interdisciplinary work to link close musical readings with rigorous cultural analysis in the treatment of artists such as Martha and the Vandellas, The Crystals, The Blossoms, Brenda Lee, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Tina Turner, and Marianne Faithfull. Currently available studies of 1960s girl groups/girl singers fall into one of three categories: industry-generated accounts of the music's production and sales, sociological commentaries, or omnibus chronologies/discographies. She's So Fine, by contrast, focuses on clearly defined themes via case studies of selected artists. Within this analytical rather than historically comprehensive framework, this book presents new research and original observations on the 60s girl group/girl singer phenomenon.

Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.

How has the history of rock 'n' roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genre's primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is the cost of failing to question such assumptions? "Stories We Could Tell:Putting Words to American Popular Music" identifies eight typical strategies used when critics and historians write about American popular music, and subjects each to forensic analysis. This posthumous book is a unique work of cultural historiography that analyses, catalogues, and contextualizes music writing in order to afford the reader new perspectives on the field of cultural production, and offer new ways of thinking about, and writing about, popular music.

In this book, Julian Hellaby presents a detailed study of English piano playing and career management as it was in the middle years of the twentieth century. Making regular comparisons with early twenty-first-century practice, the author examines career-launching mechanisms, such as auditions and competitions, and investigates available means of career sustenance, including artist management, publicity outlets, recital and concerto work, broadcasts, recordings and media reviews. Additionally, Hellaby considers whether a mid-twentieth-century school of English piano playing may be identified and, if so, whether it has lasted into the early decades of the twenty-first century. The author concludes with an appraisal of the state of English pianism in recent years and raises questions about its future. Drawing on extensive research from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, this book is structured around case-studies of six pianists who were commencing and then developing their careers between approximately 1935 and 1970. The professional lives and playing styles of Malcolm Binns, Peter Katin, Moura Lympany, Denis Matthews, Valerie Tryon and David Wilde are examined, and telling comparisons are made between the state of affairs then and that of more recent times. Engagingly written, the book is likely to appeal to professional and amateur pianists, piano teachers, undergraduate and postgraduate music students, academics and anyone with an interest in the history of pianists, piano performance and music performance history in general.

The similarities between the chanson franAaise and the canzone d'autore have been often noted but never fully explored. Both genres are national forms which involve the figure of the singer-songwriter, both experienced their golden age of production in the post-World War II period and both are enduringly popular, still accounting for a large proportion of record sales in their respective countries. Rachel Haworth looks beyond these superficial similarities, and investigates the nature of the relationship between the two genres. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing textual analysis of song lyrics, cultural history and popular music studies, Haworth considers the different ways in which French and Italian song is thought about, written about and constructed. Through an in-depth study of the discourse surrounding chanson and the canzone d'autore, the volume analyses the development of the genres' rules and rhetoric, identifying the key themes of Authority, Authenticity and Influence. The book finally considers the legacy of major artists, looking at modern perspectives on Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, Leo Ferre, Fabrizio De Andre and Giorgio Gaber, ultimately affording a deeper understanding of the notions of quality and value in the context of chanson franAaise and the canzone d'autore.

The Festivalization of Culture explores the links between various local and global cultures, communities, identities and lifestyle narratives as they are both constructed and experienced in the festival context. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from Australia and Europe, festivals are examined as sites for the performance and critique of lifestyle, identity and cultural politics; as vehicles for the mobilization and cementation of local and global communities; and as spatio-temporal events that inspire and determine meaning in people's lives. Investigating the manner in which festivals are no longer merely periodic, cultural, religious or historical events within communities, but rather a popular means through which citizens consume and experience culture, this book also sheds light on the increasing diversity of contemporary societies and the role played by festivals as sites of cohesion, cultural critique and social mobility. As such, this book will be of interest to those working in areas such as the sociology, consumption and commodification of culture, social and cultural geography, anthropology, cultural studies and popular music studies.

Founding member of Megadeth and former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine tells a never-before-heard story of the lifetime he has spent in rock 'n' roll. But this extraordinary tale, riddled with his own personal ups and downs, is also the inside account of two of the most influential heavy metal bands in the world. Here, for the first time ever, Dave Mustaine tells the tale of two of the biggest metal bands in history; a story yet to be told from the inside. Metallica, the pioneers of the thrash metal genre, rocketed to international fame in the 1980s, selling over 90 million records worldwide, making it the most successful band of its kind - ever. Megadeth, the second most successful thrash metal band ever, have sold more than 20 million albums worldwide, including six consecutive platinum albums. Despite their enormous success together, Dave and Metallica have bad blood by the bucket-load. In April of 1983, due in part to alcoholism and in part to personality clashes with founding members Hetfield and Ulrich, Dave was unceremoniously fired from the band, dumped at a Greyhound bus station in Rochester, NY with a single ticket back to LA. How did such an abrupt end come about? How did he pick himself back up, recover his dignity, and go on to send another band into the dizzying heights of rock stardom? The time has come to set the record straight. From the early, crazy days of Metallica to his split with the band, and to his glorious reign with Megadeth, Dave has seen and experienced life's extremities. This startlingly candid, refreshingly in-your-face memoir tells it all.

For at least two centuries, and arguably much longer, Ireland has exerted an important influence on the development of the traditional, popular and art musics of other regions, and in particular those of Britain and the United States. During the past decade or so, the traditional musics of the so-called Celtic regions have become a focus of international interest. The phenomenal success of shows such as Riverdance (which appeared in 1995, spawned from a 1994 Eurovision Song Contest interval act) brought Irish music and dance to a global audience and played a part in the further commoditization of Irish culture, including traditional music. However, there has been until now, relatively little serious musicological study of the traditional music of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a divided community in which traditional culture, in all its manifestations, is widely understood as a marker of religious affiliation and ethnic identity. Since the outbreak of the most recent 'troubles' around 1968, the borders between the communities have often been marked by music. For example, many in the Catholic, nationalist community, regard the music of Orange flute bands and Lambeg drums as a source of intimidation. Equally, many in the Protestant community have distanced themselves from Irish music as coming from a different ethnic tradition, and some have rejected tunes, styles and even instruments because of their association with the Catholic community and the Irish Republic. Of course, during the same period many other Protestants and Catholics have continued to perform in an apolitical context and often together, what in earlier times would simply have been regarded as folk or country music. With the increasing espousal of a discrete Ulster Scots tradition since the signing of the Belfast (or 'Good Friday') Agreement in 1998, the characteristics of the traditional music performed in Northern Ireland, and the place of Protestant musicians within popular Irish culture, clearly require a more thoroughgoing analysis. David Cooper's book provides such analysis, as well as ethnographic and ethnomusicological studies of a group of traditional musicians from County Antrim. In particular, this book offers a consideration of the cultural dynamics of Northern Ireland with respect to traditional music.

By the end of 1973, Deep Purple Mk2 was no more. Ian Gillan had been replaced by David Coverdale on vocals whilst Roger Glover had been replaced by Glenn Hughes on bass and vocals. It left the nucleus of Ritchie Blackmore, Jon Lord and Ian Paice to take Deep Purple in a new direction, which eventually came to a halt with the Mk4 line-up in 1976. With Deep Purple In Rock (1970), Fireball (1971), Machine Head (1972) and Who Do We Think We Are (1973) to Mk2's credit, many fans lived in hope that one day, the band would get back together - with the music press occasionally courting the odd rumour that it would happen! Finally, in April 1984, the reunion of Deep Purple Mk2 was announced. Fans had got their wish. Or had they? With the landscape of rock and pop music having changed since the band's success in the seventies, and with each member of Deep Purple Mk2 having nurtured very different careers as individuals by that point, a reunion was never going to be plain sailing! In this this book, Laura Shenton MA LLCM DipRSL examines the merits and challenges of what it was for Deep Purple Mk2 to get back together in the eighties. Included is a critical analysis of Mk2's second round of albums: Perfect Strangers (1984), The House Of Blue Light (1987) and The Battle Rages On... (1993).