This book provides in-depth analysis of the words, music, and recordings of Elvis Costello, one of the most enigmatic, eclectic, and critically acclaimed singer-songwriters of the rock era. Elvis Costello is one of the greatest pop songwriters of his generation as well as one of the most significant songwriters of the 20th century. His career's length now approaching four decades, Costello continues to be vital part of pop culture through live performances, recordings, and the iconic nature of his work. The Words and Music of Elvis Costello provides in-depth analysis of this important artist's words, music, and recordings. Arranged chronologically, the book places Costello in the cultural context of his time and place; addresses the overlaps between rock, classical, torch song, and jazz in Costello's highly eclectic range of songs from 1975 to the present; provides a look at the uniquely British aspects of his work; and uniquely spotlights his compositional techniques and approaches to musical form. The book covers everything from Costello's first album My Aim Is True as well as his other albums in the 1970s to his body of work in the '80s and '90s to his continuing eclecticism in the 21st century as he successfully integrates what would appear to be mutually exclusive genres. The concluding chapter provides analysis of the critical commentary about Elvis Costello's work as a performer and songwriter over his long career. Provides expert analysis of the words and music of Elvis Costello within a cultural context that will benefit readers interested in popular music as well as popular music scholars and serious fans of Elvis Costello Explains the uniquely British aspects of Costello's work and illuminates the role that Costello's Irish-Catholic heritage plays in his work Places Costello's work within the context of postmodernism Provides in-depth analysis of Costello's approach to musical form-an approach that is highly unusual among rock musicians

This insightful biography looks at the turbulent lives, groundbreaking music and lyrics, and powerful brand of hip hop's infamous Wu-Tang Clan. The Wu-Tang Clan and RZA: A Trip through Hip Hop's 36 Chambers chronicles the rise of the Wu-Tang Clan from an underground supergroup to a globally recognized musical conglomerate. Enhanced by the author's one-on-one interviews with group members, the book covers the entire Wu-Tang Clan catalog of studio albums, as well as albums that were produced or heavily influenced by producer/rapper RZA. Wu-Tang Clan's albums are analyzed and discussed in terms of their artistry as well as in terms of their critical, cultural, and commercial impact. By delving into the motivation behind the creation of pivotal songs and albums and mining their dense metaphor and wordplay, the book provides an understanding of what made a team of nine friends and relatives from Staten Island with a love of Kung Fu movies into not just a music group, but a powerful cultural movement. A chronology of important events and milestones pertaining to the Wu-Tang Clan Photographs of the group and its individual members A glossary of slang words and colloquial jargon used in Wu-Tang Clan's lyrics

Even More Rock Family Trees is the eagerly awaited new collection by rock's premier draughtsman and archivist Pete Frame. A legend in his own lunchtime, Frame is justly celebrated for his unique contributions to the literature of the music he loves.This latest set includes newly drawn family trees of Elton John, the Allman Brothers Band 1, ELP, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Winwood, The Drifters, Roxy Music, Roger McGuinn, Beach Boys, Martin Carthy, Shirley Collilns, Yes, Asia, Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds, Miles Davis, the Creation label and many more.

More than 50 years after their breakup, the Beatles are still attracting fans from various generations, all while retaining their original fan base from the 1960s. Why have those first-generation fans continued following the Beatles and are now introducing their grandchildren to the group? Why are current teens affected by the band's music? And perhaps most importantly, how and why do the Beatles continue to resonate with successive generations? Unlike other bands of their era, the Beatles seem permanently frozen in time, having never descended into "nostalgia act" territory. Instead, even after the announcement of the band's breakup in 1970, the group has maintained its cultural and musical relevance. Their timeless quality appeals to younger generations while maintaining the loyalty of older fans. While the Beatles indeed represent a specific time period, their music and words address issues as meaningful today as they were during the Summer of Love: politics, war, sex, drugs, art, and creative liberation. As the first anthology to assess the nature of fan response and the band's enduring appeal, Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years defines and explores these unique qualities and the key ways in which this particular pop fusion has inspired such loyalty and multigenerational popularity.

Despite the explosion of scholarly interest in the "global 1968" phenomenon, the seminal influence of the arts - in both their popular and avant-garde iterations - has too often been neglected. Student activism in the space of the university and the street made up only a part of the broad anti-authoritarian eruption of 1968, and not even necessarily the most important one. Arguably more fundamental was a broad democratization of cultural production in which avant-garde artists and youthful appropriators alike played a leading role. Cultural forms such as art, "happenings," fashion, comics, movies, and music were critically important to the new youth sensibility and its dissemination within society more broadly. Popular music and visual culture were among the most important of these categories, opening up new vistas of emancipatory possibility and fueling the development of new stylistic codes. This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars in history, film and media studies, cultural studies, art history, music and other disciplines to consider the symbiosis of the sonic and the visual that so powerfully shaped sixties counterculture.

In the late 1920s, Dmitry Shostakovich emerged as one of the first Soviet film composers. With his first score for the silent film the New Babylon (1929) and the many sound scores that followed, he was positioned to observe and participate in the changing politics of the film industry and negotiate the role of the film composer. In The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich, Joan Titus examines the scores of six of Shostakovich's films, from 1928 through 1936. Instead of investigating Shostakovich as a composer, a rebel, a communist, or a dissident, as innumerable studies do, Titus approaches him as a concept in itself-as an idea-and asks why and how listeners understand him as they do. Through Shostakovich's scores, Titus engages with the construct of Soviet intelligibility, the filmmaking and scoring processes, and the cultural politics of scoring Soviet film music, asking why and how listeners understand the composer the way they do. The discussions of the scores are enriched by the composer's own writing on film music, along with archival materials and recently discovered musical manuscripts that illuminate the collaborative processes of the film teams, studios, and composer. The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich commingles film studies, musicology, and Russian studies with original scholarship, and is sure to be of interest to a wide audience including musicologists, film scholars, historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, and Slavicists.

Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed.

Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more.

The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Leopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).

If Benny Goodman was the "King of Swing," then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne. Now Jeffrey Magee offers a fascinating account of Henderson's musical career, throwing new light on the emergence of modern jazz and the world that created it.
Drawing on an unprecedented combination of sources, including sound recordings and hundreds of scores that have been available only since Goodman's death, Magee illuminates Henderson's musical output, from his early work as a New York bandleader, to his pivotal role in building the Kingdom of Swing. He shows how Henderson, standing at the forefront of the New York jazz scene during the 1920s and '30s, assembled the era's best musicians, simultaneously preserving jazz's distinctiveness and performing popular dance music that reached a wide audience. Magee reveals how, in Henderson's largely segregated musical world, black and white musicians worked together to establish jazz, how Henderson's style rose out of collaborations with many key players, how these players deftly combined improvised and written music, and how their work negotiated artistic and commercial impulses.
Whether placing Henderson's life in the context of the Harlem Renaissance or describing how the savvy use of network radio made the Henderson-Goodman style a national standard, Jeffrey Magee brings to life a monumental musician who helped to shape an era.
"An invaluable survey of Henderson's life and music."
--Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times
"Magee has written an important book, illuminating an era too often reduced to its most familiar names. Goodman might have been the King of Swing, but Henderson here emerges as that kingdom's chief architect."
--Boston Globe
"Excellent.... Jazz fans have waited 30 years for a trained musicologist...to evaluate Henderson's strengths and weaknesses and attempt to place him in the history of American music."
--Will Friedwald, New York Sun

The Word Rhythm Dictionary: A Resource for Writers, Rappers, Poets, and Lyricists is a new kind of dictionary-one that reflects the use of "rhythm rhymes" by rappers, poets, and songwriters of today. This is an eminently practical reference work for all wordsmiths looking to add musicality to their writing. Users of this dictionary can alphabetically look up words in the General Index to find collections of words that have the same rhythm as the original word and are readily useable in ways that are familiar to us in everything from vers libre poetry to the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan and hip hop groups. Professional writers and students have long used traditional rhyming dictionaries for inspiration by perusing lists of rhyming words; they may ask themselves, "I need a word that rhymes with blue," and are led to shoe, flu, or you. These rhyming words evoke through juxtaposition new images, thoughts, and actions that inspire creative directions and pleasing twists as verses and stanzas unfold. For the first time ever, this dictionary now allows writers and poets to ask the same question, but of word rhythm- "I need a word with the same rhythm as butterfly. . . . " Today's lyricists and poets know that there is so much more to the flow of their creations than just matching vowels. The Word Rhythm Dictionary organizes words by additional properties: phonetic similarity (alliteration and literary consonance), the number of syllables in words, and syllable stress patterns. Never has it been easier to locate words that feature similar sounds, matching meters, and rhythmic grooves, from traditional rhymes like "clashing" and "splashing," to near rhymes like "rollover" and "bulldozer," "unrefuted undisputed" to pure metrical matches, like "biology" and "photography." Additional appendixes allow readers to search according to poetic metrical feet and musical rhythm through a visual index of notated rhythms, allowing musicians and lyricists to track down words that match preexisting motives and melodies. This book could become the new fun addiction (or... addiction affliction...constriction conviction...conniption prescription...subscription conscription) for writers, musicians, lyricists, rappers, poets, and wordsmiths alike. Oh, and it's a lot of fun just to browse!

This book explores the two major reasons for hip-hop culture's proliferation throughout the world: 1) the global centrality of African American popular culture and the transnational pop culture industry of record companies and entertainment conglomerates; and 2) "connective marginalities" that are extant social inequalities forming the foundation for an "underground" network of hip-hop communities. Both of these levels of hip-hop's global circulation are based in the youth culture's Africanist aesthetic, which is an extension of previous black artistic expressions such as verbal word play, polyrhythmic dance improvisations, radical juxtapositions of musical structures, and the folkloric trickster figure. Additionally, the text explores computer technology and the internet in this age of information that also serves hip-hop culture's globalization.

While some people find new opportunities in the postindustrial economy, many working-class men find their social and economic well-being collapse as blue-collar jobs are outsourced and offshored to the global labor market. Faced with limited options to earn a living-wage, many of these blue-collar workers are instead changing who they are, embracing a deviant, rebellious identity expressed by the contemporary southern rock revival musicians studied in this book. Although loosely based in the traditional culture and lifestyle of the southeastern United States, contemporary southerness has little to do with region but instead is a way to rebel from the very institutions blue-collar men traditionally used as the basis of their masculine pride: family, education, employment, military service, and religion. This contemporary form of southerness reflected in their music also involves deviance, as many of these men adorn themselves with the highly controversial confederate flag, binge drink alcohol, brawl with one another and use drugs. Combining interviews, participant observation and a lyrical analysis, this book explores these aspects of rebellious southerness through music as it exists in the ideal sense and as individual men try to live up to these subcultural ideals in their daily lives. The southern rock revival is a new social movement carving out a place for an alternative way to live while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes about poor men, reinforcing social disadvantage and marginalization.

(Book). Although together for only five years, The Yardbirds exerted tremendous influence on the music and style of the '60s and for decades beyond. Their impact has been felt throughout the rock genre, from psychedelia to blues-rock, heavy metal, and the music of today's jam bands. The Yardbirds came from middle-class England, embraced the soulful music of the African-American South, and helped re-import it back into the States as the embryo of heavy metal music. In the process, the band produced three guitar greats: Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Every fan of The Yardbirds, or of '60s-derived music in general, will revel in this book (which includes more than 50 photos from the group's heyday, plus a detailed diary of every gig, recording and broadcast they did) and enjoy reading the stories old and new as much as Clayson enjoys telling them.

From Cliff Richard to The Rolling Stones, and from The Beatles to Plan B, pop music has been inseparable from its cinematic exploitation. This book constitutes the first delivered examination of the place of the pop music film in British cinematic and musical history. It explores the way music and film have exerted a mutual influence at an economic, social and artistic level. From The Tommy Steele Story, a cheap and cheerful 'cash in' on what was considered a passing fad, through Richard Lester's innovative and globally successful Beatles vehicles and on to the Jungian artistic maze of Mick Jagger's Performance, the 1950s and 1960s saw pop acts and directors create an entire life-cycle for a new film genre. Thereafter, its intermittent revivals, be it Slade in Flame or the Spice Girls in Spice World, have kept sound and vision inseparable in the public consciousness, revisiting and reshaping our pop and film heritage.

"Everybody has to start somewhere. Businessmen start on the ground floor and try to work their way up the corporate ladder. Baseball players bide their time in the minor leagues wishing for an opportunity to move up and play in the majors. Musical compositions aren't very different - some songs just don't climb the charts the first time they're recorded. However, with perseverance, the ideal singer, the right chemistry, impeccable timing, vigorous promotion, and a little luck, these songs can become very famous." So writes Bob Leszczak in the opening pages of Who Did It First?: Great Rock and Roll Cover Songs and Their Original Artists. In this third and final volume to the Who Did It First? series, readers explore the hidden history of the most famous, indeed legendary, rock songs and standards. Did you know that the Wild Ones had a "Wild Thing" before the Troggs? Were you aware that it took a second shot for "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" to make the charts? Had you heard that Guy Villari and the Regents dated "Barbara Ann" five years before the Beach Boys? Were you privy to the fact that there was "Hanky Panky" going on with Ellie Greenwich and the Raindrops, as well as the Summits, before Tommy James and the Shondells made the song a number 1 classic? Some of the information contained within these pages will shock, rattle and roll you. You may fancy yourself a music expert, but this third and last in a series of titles devoted to the story of great songs and their revival as great covers is filled with eye openers. In many instances, one's eyes will open even wider as a result of the list of cover artists (with Paul Anka's remake of Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" leading the pack). Who Did It First? Great Rock and Roll Cover Songs and Their Original Artists is the perfect playlist builder. So whether quizzing friends at a party, answering a radio station contest, or just satisfying an insatiable curiosity to know who really did do it first, this work is a must-have.

This volume examines how African indigenous popular music is deployed in democracy, politics and for social crusades by African artists. Exploring the role of indigenous African popular music in environmental health communication and gender empowerment, it subsequently focuses on how the music portrays the African future, its use by African youths, and how it is affected by advanced broadcast technologies and the digital media. Indigenous African popular music has long been under-appreciated in communication scholarship. However, understanding the nature and philosophies of indigenous African popular music reveals an untapped diversity which can only be unraveled by the knowledge of myriad cultural backgrounds from which its genres originate. With a particular focus on scholarship from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa, this volume explores how, during the colonial period and post-independence dispensation, indigenous African music genres and their artists were mainstreamed in order to tackle emerging issues, to sensitise Africans about the affairs of their respective nations and to warn African leaders who have failed and are failing African citizenry about the plight of the people. At the same time, indigenous African popular music genres have served as a beacon to the teeming African youths to express their dreams, frustrations about their environments and to represent themselves. This volume explores how, through the advent of new media technologies, indigenous African popular musicians have been working relentlessly for indigenous production, becoming champions of good governance, marginalised population, and repositories of indigenous cultural traditions and cosmologies.

Having spent his entire career as a professional singer, songwriter, and musician, Thinking About Tomorrow is the amazing tale of rock and roll survivor Keith West. From being inspired by Elvis in the 1950s to pop stardom and working alongside the greats of the music world in the 1960s, Keith was at the eye of the storm alongside peers including The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and many, many more. With his Tomorrow bandmates - Steve Howe, Junior and Twink - Keith was a pioneer of psychedelic music in the 1960s with songs such as My White Bicycle, and he also achieved international fame alongside Mark Wirtz with the song Excerpt from a Teenage Opera (popularly remembered by millions of music fans as Grocer Jack). Tomorrow evolved from the R&B and mod bands Four + 1 and The In Crowd and, while their recorded output is small, their influence on other artists and the way rock music would develop is widely-regarded as enormous. Steve Howe went on to continue his incredible guitar adventures in Yes and Asia, and Twink would continue to influence the rock world as a member of pioneering bands The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, and Hawkwind. Keith would go on to have a long career in the music business, embracing punk in the late 70s and indie music in the 80s and 90s. But this is no straightforward tale of rock and roll hedonism; the book also pulls back the curtain on the mysterious world of the music industry. It reveals how agents, managers, publishers, record companies, songwriters, artists and the media are all locked together in an endless pursuit of the elusive elixir of their professional lives - a hit. Yet, once lightning has struck, the tragic consequences, the tremendous opportunities and the money generated can still create ripples half a century later...

For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.

Wisdom and musings on creativity and life from one of the world's most beloved musicians, producers, and mentors, Quincy Jones12 Notes is a self-development guide that will affirm that creativity is a calling that can and should be answered, no matter your age or experience. Drawing from his own life, and those of his many creative collaborators past and present, Quincy Jones presents readers with lessons that are hardworking and accessible, yet speak to the passion of self-expression. He includes sections as deep as how to transform grief into power, and as practical as how to set goals and articulate intentions through daily affirmations. Weaving his story throughout, Jones lets readers in on his own creative process, as well as the importance of letting honesty, hard work, and good relationships drive your career.

The Hip Hop Movement offers a critical theory and alternative history of rap music and hip hop culture by examining their roots in the popular musics and popular cultures of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement explores what each of these musics and movements contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement. Ultimately, this book's remixes (as opposed to chapters) reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely "popular music" and "popular culture" in the conventional sense and reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. With this in mind, sociologist and musicologist Reiland Rabaka critically reinterprets rap and neo-soul as popular expressions of the politics, social visions, and cultural values of a contemporary multi-issue movement: the Hip Hop Movement. Rabaka argues that rap music, hip hop culture, and the Hip Hop Movement are as deserving of critical scholarly inquiry as previous black popular musics, such as the spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, and funk, and previous black popular movements, such as the Black Women's Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and Black Women's Liberation Movement. This volume, equal parts alternative history of hip hop and critical theory of hip hop, challenges those scholars, critics, and fans of hip hop who lopsidedly over-focus on commercial rap, pop rap, and gangsta rap while failing to acknowledge that there are more than three dozen genres of rap music and many other socially and politically progressive forms of hip hop culture beyond DJing, MCing, rapping, beat-making, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing.

Almost 20 years ago Michael Brocken created from his doctoral research, what became both a seminal and contested volume concerning the social mores surrounding the British Folk Revival up to that point in time: The British Folk Revival 1944-2002. In this long-overdue second edition he revisits not only his own research, but also that of others from the 1990s and early 21st century. He then considers how a discourse of folkloric authenticity emerged in the closing years of the 19th century and how a worrying nationalistic immanence came to surround folk music and dance during the inter-war years. Brocken also proposes that the media: records, radio and TV in post-WWII folk revivalism can offer us important insights into how self-directed learning of the folk guitar emerged. Brocken moves on to consider the business structures of the contemporary folk scene and how relationships are formed between contemporary folk business and the digital and social media spheres. In his penultimate chapter he discusses the masculinisation of folk traditions and asks important questions about how our folk traditions are carried and are authorised. In the final chapter he also considers the rise of an exciting new folk live music built environment.

(FAQ). It has been 40 years since the untimely death of L.A.'s mystic and rock's Dionysus, Jim Morrison, yet the Doors have consistently inspired new generations of fans worldwide ever since. Highlighting one of the most influential, original, and outrageous American bands of the 1960s, The Doors FAQ is a dynamic, unorthodox exploration of this remarkable band and its enigmatic lead singer. Drawing upon unique sources, Rich Weidman digs deep and serves up fresh perspective on the music, from the garage to the hits to the outtakes; and on the band's members, from their roots, influences, and key industry partners to their rare talents, personal foibles, love affairs, and arrests. This volume also details every studio album and live recording, all the highs and lows of the Doors in concert (including the notorious 1969 Miami concert), Morrison's 40-day trial, and the death of the "Lizard King" in Paris in 1971, as well as post-Morrison milestones. Unlike the straightforward narratives of other Doors biographies, this inventive, ceremonious biographical collage leaves no stone unturned, covering the band both with Morrison and post-Morrison, including the 2010 When You're Strange documentary and the recent pardon of Morrison by the State of Florida for the Miami concert. Countless rare images from album art to ticket stubs to posters accompany the text, in this dazzling edition of solid rock scholarship.

'WHICH IS THE BEST BAND I'VE BEEN IN? THE SMALL FACES WERE THE MOST CREATIVE, THE FACES WERE THE MOST FUN,THE WHO WERE THE MOST EXCITING. THESE WERE ELECTRIFYING DAYS IN MUSIC. WE WERE ALL UNTRIED, UNTESTED. WHAT WAS STOPPING US? NOTHING.' As drummer with the Small Faces, Faces and later The Who, Kenney Jones' unique sense of rhythm was the heartbeat that powered three of the most influential rock bands of all time. Beginning in London's post-war East End, Kenney's story takes us through the birth of the Mod revolution, the mind-bending days of the late-1960s and the raucous excesses of the '70s and '80s. In a career spanning six decades, Kenney was at the epicentre of many of the most exciting moments in music history and has experienced everything the industry has to offer. He jointly created some of the world's most-loved records, hung out with the Stones, Beatles, David Bowie, Keith Moon and Rod Stewart, and suffered the loss of close friends to rock 'n' roll excess and success. The legacy created by Kenney and his band mates has influenced acts as diverse as Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols and Oasis. Now, for the very first time, Kenney tells the full story of how a young Cockney Herbert played his part in the biggest social transformation in living memory - the people, the parties, the friendships, the fall-outs, the laughter, the sadness, the sex, drugs, and a lot of rock 'n' roll, while also opening up about his own deeply personal battles and passions, too. This is a vivid and breath-taking immersion into the most exciting era of music history and beyond.