It's 1982 and the Ramones are in a gutter-bound spiral. Following a run of inconsistent albums and deep in the throes of internal tensions the legendary quartet is about to crash and burn.THEnter Richie Ramone.THThen a 26-year-old from New Jersey named Richard Reinhardt he's snapped up by the group to be their new drummer and instantly goes from the obscurity of the underground club scene to membership in the most famous punk-rock band of all time revitalizing the pioneering outfit with his powerful precise and blindingly fast beats a composing classic cuts like the menacing anthem Somebody Put Something in My Drink and becoming the only Ramones percussionist to sing lead vocals for the group. With the Ramones he performs over five hundred shows at venues all around the world and records three storming studio albums a before abruptly quitting the band and going deep underground. To most fans this crucial figure in the band's history has remained a mystery his tale untold.THUntil now.THEI Know Better Now: My Life Before During and After the RamonesE is the firsthand four-on-the-floor account of a life in rock 'n' roll and in one of its most influential acts a straight from the sticks of the man who kept the beat.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE '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 . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk's fury and high stakes' 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

After discovering a derelict record plant on the edge of a northern English city, and hearing that it was once visited by David Bowie, Karl Whitney embarks upon a journey to explore the industrial cities of British pop music. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol: at various points in the past these cities have all had distinctive and highly identifiable sounds. But how did this happen? What circumstances enabled those sounds to emerge? How did each particular city - its history, its physical form, its accent - influence its music? How were these cities and their music different from each other? And what did they have in common? Hit Factories tells the story of British pop through the cities that shaped it, tracking down the places where music was performed, recorded and sold, and the people - the performers, entrepreneurs, songwriters, producers and fans - who made it all happen. From the venues and recording studios that occupied disused cinemas, churches and abandoned factories to the terraced houses and back rooms of pubs where bands first rehearsed, the terrain of British pop can be retraced with a map in hand and a head filled with music and its many myths.

Described, variously, as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "rock and Rimbaud"), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. Thus, while due attention will be given to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core will be a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics - the book will approach Horses as a work of performance poetry more than anything else.The book's centrepiece will be a track-by-track breakdown of the original album sequence, together with detailed discussion of outtakes and early recordings. There will be sections that focus on a specific lyrical preoccupation: love, sex, gender, death, dreams, God, metamorphosis, intoxication, apocalypse and transcendence. Philip Shaw demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music; how it achieved nothing less than a complete and systematic derangement of the senses.

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!

""Lexicon Devil" is, pure and simple, the finest volume on punk to have seen the light of print. (Yes, folks: that includes "Please Kill Me.") Great book "--Richard Meltzer

Production has started on the documentary feature based on the book.

Although nobody realised it at the time, the historic importance of the MC5 is vast. Often considered a 'post-punk' band, their influence reaches far and wide, with everyone from Green Day, The White Stripes, Motorhead, Ramones, Rage Against The Machine and Bad Brains citing them. Fuelled by the radical politics of the White Panther party, the MC5 preached revolution and were often a target for the authorities. Having released three albums between 1969 and 1971, two of the band passed away and guitarist Wayne Kramer spent time behind bars for drug-related offences. Thirty years of low-key solo projects followed, before the band reunited in the new Millennium for a one-off show that turned into a full-on reunion. It details not only the seismic impact that they've had on music, but also the social climate in which they evolved.

Twenty-eight years after its original release, the Clash's "London Calling "was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Route 19 Revisited is about the making of this iconic album, detailing the stories behind its songs and placing them in contexts personal, musical and socio-political.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today, the cult of Jawbreaker-in their own words, "the little band that could but would probably rather not"-is now many times greater than it was when they broke up in 1996. Like the best work of Fugazi, The Clash, and Operation Ivy, the album is now is a rite of passage and a beloved classic among partisans of intelligent, committed, literary punk music and poetry. Why, when a thousand other artists came and went in that confounding decade of the 90s, did Jawbreaker somehow come to seem like more than just another band? Why do they persist, today, in meaning so much to so many people? And how did it happen that, two years after releasing their masterpiece, the band that was somehow more than just a band to its fans-closer to equipment for living-was no longer? Ronen Givony's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is an extended tribute in the spirit of Nicholson Baker's U & I: a passionate, highly personal, and occasionally obsessive study of one of the great confessional rock albums of the 90s. At the same time, it offers a quizzical look back to the toxic authenticity battles of the decade, ponders what happened to the question of "selling out," and asks whether we today are enriched or impoverished by that debate becoming obsolete.

Ecstasy did for house music what LSD did for psychedelic rock. Now, in "Energy Flash," journalist Simon Reynolds offers a revved-up and passionate inside chronicle of how MDMA ("ecstasy") and MIDI (the basis for electronica) together spawned the unique rave culture of the 1990s.
England, Germany, and Holland began tinkering with imported Detroit techno and Chicago house music in the late 1980s, and when ecstasy was added to the mix in British clubs, a new music subculture was born. A longtime writer on the music beat, Reynolds started watching--and partaking in--the rave scene early on, observing firsthand ecstasy's sense-heightening and serotonin-surging effects on the music and the scene. In telling the story, Reynolds goes way beyond straight music history, mixing social history, interviews with participants and scene-makers, and his own analysis of the sounds with the names of key places, tracks, groups, scenes, and artists. He delves deep into the panoply of rave-worthy drugs and proper rave attitude and etiquette, exposing a nuanced musical phenomenon.
Read on, and learn why is nitrous oxide is called "hippy crack."

What Britain refined, America defined. Assembled by two key figures at the heart of the movement and told through the voices o musicians, artists, iconoclastic reporters and entrepreneurial groupies, PLEASE KILL ME is the full decadent story of the American punk scene, through the early years of Andy Warhol's Factory to the New York underground of Max's Kansas City and later, its heyday at CBGB's, spiritual home to the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie. PLEASE KILL ME goes backstage and behind apartment doors to chronicle the sex, drugs and power struggles that were the very fabric of the American punk community, to the time before piercing and tattoos became commonplace and when every concert, new band and fashion statement marked an absolute first. From Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to the Clash and the Sex Pistols (the first time around), McNeil and McCain document a time of glorious self-destruction and perverse innocence - possibly the last time so many will so much fun in the pursuit of excess.

Please Feed Me is a punk rock vegan cookbook. Each recipe features an anecdote by a band that performed at the Hope Collective, a popular punk venue in Dublin the author helped maintain for over a decade. (The Hope Collective became a blue print and inspiration for punk and DIY spaces across Ireland and the UK.) The book features contributions from over 120 people who donated their vegan recipes and thoughts on the importance of the punk rock community and culture, including stories from seminal punk banks such as Fugazi, Bikini Kill, and Chumbawamba.
In addition to great recipes, Please Feed Me uniquely illustrates the connections between community, art, activism and health. The thunderous subtext of the book is the vital underground community and network created and maintained by a collective of organizers and hundreds of musicians at a time when most punk bands were signing to major labels for the highest dollar amount. The book documents pieces of the stories of many popular US and international punk bands that continue to have a major influence on youth subcultures today.

In the late '90s, third-wave ska broke across the American alternative music scene like a tsunami. In sweaty clubs across the nation, kids danced themselves dehydrated to the peppy rhythms and punchy horns of bands like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish. As ska caught fire, a swing revival brought even more sharp-dressed, brass-packing bands to national attention. Hell of a Hat dives deep into this unique musical moment. Prior to invading the Billboard charts and MTV, ska thrived from Orange County, California, to NYC, where Moon Ska Records had eager rude girls and boys snapping up every release. On the swing tip, retro pioneers like Royal Crown Revue had fans doing the jump, jive, and wail long before The Brian Setzer Orchestra resurrected the Louis Prima joint. Drawing on interviews with heavyweights like the Bosstones, Sublime, Less Than Jake, and Cherry Poppin' Daddies-as well as underground heroes like Mustard Plug, The Slackers, Hepcat, and The New Morty Show-Kenneth Partridge argues that the relative economic prosperity and general optimism of the late '90s created the perfect environment for fast, danceable music that-with some notable exceptions-tended to avoid political commentary. An homage to a time when plaids and skankin' were king and doing the jitterbug in your best suit was so money, Hell of a Hat is an inside look at '90s ska, swing, and the loud noises of an era when America was dreaming and didn't even know it.

England’s Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail, exclusive interviews, and rare photographs. This fully revised and updated edition of the book covers the legacy of punk twenty-five years later and provides an account of the Pistols' 1996 reunion as well as a freshly updated discography and a completely new introduction.

As teenagers in 1981, David Markey and his best friend Jordan Schwartz founded 'We Got Power', a fanzine dedicated to the hardcore punk music community in their native Los Angeles. Their text and cameras captured the early punk spirit of Black Flag, the Minutemen, Social Distortion, Youth Brigade and many others at the height of their precocious punk powers. In the process, the duo's amazing photographs also captured the dilapidated suburbs, abandoned storefronts and dereliction of the era - a rubble strewn social apocalypse that demanded a youth uprising

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.

TOTAL CHAOS is the first book telling Iggy Pop's story of The Stooges from his own words. Grammy winning editor and avid music historian Jeff Gold spent two days at the rock legend's home sharing pictures and memorabilia from his collection. Featuring a trove of unseen photos, TOTAL CHAOS shows and tells, with the help of best-selling author Jon Savage, the story of the Stooges from those tell-all interviews. "Gasp at the awe inspiring memorabilia and frank talk in Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges/As Told By Iggy Pop"-- Mojo Magazine "Tells the band's revolutionary story through many never-before-published photos and extensive interviews...(and) contributions from Johnny Marr, Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, Joan Jett and Jack White."-- Rolling Stone "A fantastic new book...a must-read for both diehard fans and anyone who wants to learn first-hand from Pop what it was like from the inside looking out in one of the seminal bands of the post-'60s era."-- Esquire

'Brilliant biography of an undersung late-blooming treasure . . . subtly profound as well as wickedly entertaining, this biography does its subject scintillating justice' Mojo Cruel to Be Kind is the definitive account of Nick Lowe's uncompromising life as a songwriter and entertainer, from his days at Stiff Records, to becoming the driving force behind Rockpile, to the 1979 smash hit 'Cruel To Be Kind'. Nick's original compositions have been recorded by the best in the business, from enfant terrible of the New-Wave, Elvis Costello, to 'The Godfather of Rhythm and Soul', Solomon Burke; from household names, including Engelbert Humperdink, Diana Ross, and Johnny Cash, to legendary vocalists such as Curtis Stigers, Tom Petty, and Rod Stewart. His reputation as one of the most influential musicians to emerge from that most formative period for pop and rock music is cast in stone. He will forever be the man they call the 'Jesus of Cool'. 'Nick's poise as a singer, his maturity, and his use of tone is beautiful. I can't believe it's this guy I've been watching since I was a teenager' Elvis Costello, 2013 'The master of subversive pop' Nick Kent, NME, 1977 'Nick Lowe is such a f*cking good songwriter! Am I allowed to say that?' Curtis Stigers, 2016