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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
'No Feelings', 'No Fun', 'No Future'. The years 1976-84 saw punk
emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an
aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence,
high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and
re-energised British youth culture, inserting marginal voices and
political ideas into pop. Fanzines and independent labels
flourished; an emphasis on doing it yourself enabled provincial
scenes to form beyond London's media glare. This was the period of
Rock Against Racism and benefit gigs for the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament and the striking miners. Matthew Worley charts the full
spectrum of punk's cultural development from the Sex Pistols,
Buzzcocks and Slits through the post-punk of Joy Division, the
industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle and onto the 1980s diaspora
of anarcho-punk, Oi! and goth. He recaptures punk's anarchic force
as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could
reject, revolt and re-invent.
From the filth and the fury to the elegant extravaganza, 'Peter
Gravelle', the many named photographer, has remained in the shadows
of punk rock, low culture and high fashion, deflecting attention
while steadily producing an epic body of iconic work. The Death of
Photography is a tour de force, a high end art book showcasing
forty years of the best punk, fashion and portraiture of Gravelle's
career. Heavily stylised images are woven together with Gravelle's
own fascinating recollections from a live lived in technicolour.
What was I fighting for? Even now I'm not sure. Something so old and so deep, it has no words, no shape, no logic.
Viv Albertine has always been obsessed with the truth: the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. But at what cost? In this brutally honest memoir she relentlessly exposes human dysfunctionality: the impossibility of intimacy, and the damage wrought upon us by secrets and revelations, siblings and parents. Written with Albertine's unique vulnerability and intelligence, To Throw Away Unopened is a startling self-portrait and a testament to rebuilding oneself and facing the world again.
By January 1978, the Sex Pistols were the most talked about band on
the planet. They also enjoyed the sobriquet of being the "scourge"
of the British Establishment. The Pistols' anarchic antics had
largely gone unnoticed in America, and it wasn't until Warner Bros
secured the U.S. rights to distribute the band's debut album Never
Mind The Bollocks in November 1977 that the American media sat up
and took notice. Plans were soon underway to bring the Pistols over
to America, but Warners hadn't counted on the band's manager, the
irascible Malcolm McLaren. In purposely eschewing New York and Los
Angeles in favor of off-the-rock'n'roll radar outposts such as
Memphis, San Antonio and Baton Rouge, McLaren sowed the seeds for a
countercultural clash that continues to resonate across America. No
Feelings, No Future, No Fun: the Sex Pistols' '78 U.S. Tour covers
the tour from varying perspectives-with many people sharing their
experiences for the first time. The book also endeavours to
separate fact from the many fallacies that still surround those
twelve days of mayhem when the Sex Pistols wended their way across
an unsuspecting USA.
The Damned are forever in the history books as the first UK punk
band to get an album out. Damned Damned Damned was a flamethrower
of a record, led by the incendiary violence of "New Rose" (first UK
punk single as well) and "Neat Neat Neat," two shocking punk
anthems that defined the golden era of the new wave more purely
pogo-mad than anything outta The Clash or the Sex Pistols. And the
mayhem never let up, with the band already breaking up and
reforming (another first!) by 1979 for one of the greatest punk
albums of all time, Machine Gun Etiquette (by the way, The Damned
were also the first UK punk band to tour America). More punch-ups
and gratuitous vandalism ensued as the band expanded its palette
through the years. Popoff has wanted to write Lively Arts: The
Damned Deconstructed for decades, and now that it's finished, he's
been all over video and radio calling it his favourite and best
book he's ever done. For in it, Popoff got to analyse monastically
- headphones and repeat button at the ready - every damned Damned
song across all the albums and every EP and single. This herculean
task represented a joy of an exercise from a penmanship point of
view, but it was most satisfying in a proselytizing sense - Martin
wants everybody joining him in poring over The Damned catalogue in
minute detail. Let this long-suffering band of scrapping,
scratching cats in a sack know how important and beloved they are
before they're all dead!
(Book). Read & Burn is the first serious, in-depth appraisal of
Wire, one of the most influential British bands to emerge during
the punk era. If Wire were briefly a punk band, however, it was
largely by historical accident. Despite the fact that they had
complicated and transformed that category almost before they'd
begun, they seem never to have quite escaped the label. Be it punk,
post-punk, or art-punk, critics have clung onto the p-word in an
attempt to capture the essence of Wire's innovative uniqueness. But
their story which honors punk's original yet quickly forgotten
commitment to the new is one of constant remaking and remodelling,
one that stubbornly resists reduction to a single identity. As a
result, the group's projects have always balanced uneasily between
artistic endeavour and the need for commercial sustainability,
played out against the backdrop of the musicians' perennially
complex creative relationships. Tracing Wire's diverse output from
1977 up until the present, Read & Burn seeks to do justice to
their highly influential and restlessly inventive body of work by
developing a sustained critical account of their shifting
approaches. It combines analysis and interpretation with
perspective drawn from exclusive interviews with past and present
members of the band.
Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration
of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk.
Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist
spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads,
and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics,
performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with
the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche
Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV.
Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic
characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism,
urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and
challenging periods in the history of popular music.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE LONGLISTED FOR THE
HWA NON-FICTION CROWN 'A moving, powerful and highly innovative
sidelight on the fall of Communism in East Germany through punk
style and music. This is a complete original' HWA Non-Fiction Crown
Judges 'A thrilling and essential social history that details the
rebellious youth movement that helped change the world' Rolling
Stone 'A riveting and inspiring history of punk's hard-fought
struggle in East Germany' New York Times 'Wildly entertaining'
Vogue THE SECRET HISTORY OF PUNKS IN EAST GERMANY It began with a
handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British
military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended
with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a
life-changing discovery: in an authoritarian state where the future
was preordained, punk, with its rejection of society and DIY
approach to building a new one, planted the seeds for revolution.
As these kids began to form bands, they also became more visible,
and security forces - including the dreaded secret police, the
Stasi - targeted them. They were spied on by friends and family;
they were expelled from schools and fired from jobs; they were
beaten by police and imprisoned. But instead of conforming, the
punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground
movement that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Rollicking,
cinematic and thrillingly topical, this secret history brings to
life the young men and women who successfully fought
authoritarianism three chords at a time. Burning Down the Haus is a
fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution.
'Original and inspiring . . . an important work of Cold War
cultural history' Wall Street Journal
On February 21st 2012, five members of an obscure feminist
post-punk collective called Pussy Riot staged a performance in
Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Dressed in their
trademark brightly coloured dresses and balaclavas, the women
performed their song 'Punk Prayer - Mother of God, Chase Putin
Away!' in front of the altar. The performance lasted only 40
seconds but it resulted in two-year prison sentences for three of
the performers - and has turned Pussy Riot into one of the most
well-known and important protest movements of the last five years.
This necessary and timely book is an account of the Pussy Riot
protest, the ensuing global support movement, and the tangled and
controversial trial of the band members. It explores the status of
dissent in Russia, the roots of the group and their adoption - or
appropriation - by wider collectives, feminist groups and music
icons. Masha Gessen has unique access to the band and those closest
to them. Her unrivalled understanding of the Russian protest
movement makes her the ideal writer to document and explain the
rage, the beauty and the phenomenon that is Pussy Riot.
Without London band Wire, punk rock might never have developed
beyond primitive three-chord thrash and cliched songs about tower
blocks and dole queues. Arguably the first art-punks, the four
musicians - Colin Newman on vocals and guitar, Graham Lewis on bass
and vocals, Bruce Gilbert on guitar and Robert Gotobed (nee Grey)
on drums - evolved fast from their groundbreaking 1977 debut album
"Pink Flag", with its 21 short, sharp, minimalist bursts of noise
and melody. They were catalysts in the shift from punk to
post-punk, paving the way for the likes of Magazine, Gang of Four,
Public Image Limited and Joy Division. Paul Lester's book will tell
the story of this crucial transitional band, from their early days
dodging hostile crowds at punk venues like the Roxy, through their
attempts to inject some arthouse experimentation and Situationist
subversion into an increasingly conservative punk scene, up to
their split in 1981 and beyond their mid-80s return and their
various solo projects.It will take you behind the scenes and
feature interviews with the original members, following them up to
the present, poised as they are to come back with a brand new album
and filled with a renewed sense of vigour as one of the most
important bands in the last thirty years.
The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared
through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the
role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and
pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised
on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a
tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band's notorious
live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring,
inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions
emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback
channeling the rage of the working-class who'd had enough,
Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your
eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself. Yet
Psychocandy's blackened candy heart center - calling out to
phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm - makes it a pop
album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the
Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain
expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined,
emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland
grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and
uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant
account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple
with pop music's relation to ourselves.
Despite releasing records only on independent labels and receiving
virtually no radio play, Dead Kennedys routinely top both critic
and fan polls as the greatest punk band of the late 1970s and early
1980s. Their sound was inventive and tetchy, and front man Jello
Biafra's lyrics were incisive and often scathing. This
chronicle--the first in-depth book written about Dead
Kennedys--uses dozens of firsthand interviews, photos, and original
artwork to offer a new perspective on a group that was mired in
controversy almost from its inception. It examines and applauds the
band's key role in transforming punk rhetoric, both polemical and
musical, into something genuinely threatening and enormously funny.
Author Alex Ogg puts the local and global trajectory of punk into
context and, while not flinching from the wildly differing takes
the individual band members have on the evolution of the band,
attempts to be celebratory--if not uncritical.
The bands that spearheaded the late 1970s punk scene in
Australia--the Saints, Birthday Party, Radio Birdman, and the
Go-Betweens--are among the most important of their time. Inner City
Sound is the classic account of the explosive development of that
scene. Original articles from fanzines and newspapers, together
with almost 300 photographs, vividly portray the creative ferment
of the period and the dozens of bands that sprang up in the wake of
the pioneers. First published in late 1981, Inner City Sound soon
fell out of print. It became a lost classic, so sought after that
it has been bootlegged like the rare singles listed in its
discography. This new edition contains 32 extra pages of articles,
photos, and discographic data, which take the story through to
1985, when Nick Cave, the Go-Betweens, the Triffids, and others
began to break through internationally.
Punk bands have produced an abundance of poetic texts, some crude,
some elaborate, in the form of song lyrics. These lyrics are an
ideal means by which to trace the developments and explain the
conflicts and schisms that have shaped, and continue to shape, punk
culture. They can be described as the community's collective
'poetic voice,' and they come in many different forms. Their themes
range from romantic love to emotional distress to radical politics.
Some songs are intended to entertain, some to express strong
feelings, some to provoke, some to spread awareness, and some to
foment unrest. Most have an element of confrontation, of kicking
against the pricks. Socially and epistemologically, they play a
central role in the scene's internal discourse, shaping communities
and individual identities. The Poetry of Punk is an investigation
into the Anglophone punk culture, specifically in the UK and the
US, where punk originated in the mid-1970s, its focus being on the
song lyrics written and performed by punk rock and hardcore
artists.
Want to be an obscure comedy band? Now you can 'The Bobby Joe Ebola
Songbook' features easy-to-learn lyrics and chords to over 80 songs
by the infamous satiric duo, Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children
MacNuggits, along with hilarious illustrations. With savage humour
they dispense 'helpful' rock'n'roll tips for making amazing things
happen on little or no budget.
Courtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence,
ambition and appetite for confrontation has made her a target in a
music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain's wife she
was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is
pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock's attic. Yet Hole's
second album, "Live Through This," awoke a feminist consciousness
in a generation of teenage girls."Live Through This" arrived in
1994, at a tumultuous point in the history of American music. Three
years earlier, Nirvana's "Nevermind "had broken open the punk
underground, and the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl had
been published. Hole were of this context and yet outside of it:
too famous for the strict punk ethics of riot-grrrl, too explicitly
feminist to be the world's biggest rock band. And then Kurt Cobain
shot himself, four days before the album's scheduled release."Live
Through This" is an album about girlhood and motherhood; desire and
disgust; self-destruction and survival. There have been few rock
albums before or since so intimately concerned with female
experience. The album is a key document of third-wave feminism, but
the conditions that produced its particular aesthetic have
disappeared. So where did the energy of that feminism go? And why
is Courtney Love's achievement as a songwriter and musician still
not taken seriously, nearly twenty years on?
Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly
Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a
transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked
experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel,
lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this
book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the
rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s,
tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their
performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick,
Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie
Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful,
deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist
femininity, creating a new "punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital
aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture,
Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of
these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries
worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless
influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s
and 2000s.
E 1-2-3-4! ETHWith that quick count-off four hoppin' cretins from
Queens who called themselves the Ramones launched the 1970s musical
revolution known as punk rock. And ever since popular music hasn't
been the same. Perhaps the most imitated band of all time the
Ramones stripped rock 'n' roll down to its bare bones and beating
heart and handed it back to the people making it fun again and
reminding everyone that hey they could do this too.THBut da
brudders didn't just influence their key comrades in the original
punk explosion. Their raw tough sound and divine gift of enduring
melodic songcraft has power-drilled its way into musical styles as
divergent as college rock power pop hardcore punk thrash metal
grunge and the avant-garde and continues to be felt in newer waves
of young acts. And what about the music that influenced the Ramones
themselves a early rock 'n' roll surf rock British Invasion sounds
garage rock girl groups hard rock bubblegum proto-punk and glam
rock? Or the nonmusical stuff that also warped the skulls beneath
those trademark bowl haircuts a weird movies cartoons trashy TV
shows comic books and other cultural jetsam? It's all here just
waiting for you to discover and dig. Hey Ho Let's Go!
Guy Pratt came of age just as playing bass became sexy. In spurning
the guitar solo, punk put the low-end on more of an equal
footing--or maybe it was just that Paul Simonon and Bruce Foxton
were pretty cool. Either way, people were trying out the basslines
of "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" or "Peaches." Having dallied
with Funkapolitan, Pratt suddenly found himself on "Top of the
Pops" and supporting David Bowie with the smooth Australian outfit
Icehouse. At a ludicrously young age he became a sought-after bass
player to the stars, finding himself crawling from studios to bars
and from hotels to stadiums with the likes of Robert Palmer, Womack
& Womack, Bernard Edwards, Bryan Ferry, and David Crosby. The
1980s were in their prime, and with a number of Crolla-suited
appearances in windswept videos behind him, he was invited to join
Pink Floyd for a series of stadium extravaganzas to make Bono &
Co. look fairly modest. He was in The Smiths for a week, has
traveled through customs in a wheelchair after a flight with Jimmy
Page, spent time in the studio with Michael Jackson, and has lived
to tell all. This autobiographical account emerges from the
successful stand-up tour of the same name, charting his journey
from a Mod band to playing with Roxy Music at Live 8.
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