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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
Factory Records' fame and fortune were based on two bands - Joy
Division and New Order - and one personality - that of its
director, Tony Wilson. At the height of the label's success in the
late 1980s, it ran its own club, the legendary Hacienda, had a
string of international hit records, and was admired and emulated
around the world. But by the 1990s the story had changed. The back
catalogue was sold off, top bands New Order and Happy Mondays were
in disarray, and the Hacienda was shut down by the police.
Critically acclaimed on its original publication in 1996, this book
tells the complete story of Factory Records' spectacular history,
from the label's birth in 1970s Manchester, through its '80s heyday
and '90s demise. Now updated to include new material on the
re-emergence of Joy Division, the death of Tony Wilson and the
legacy of Factory Records, it draws on exclusive interviews with
the major players to give a fascinating insight into the unique
personalities and chaotic reality behind one of the UK's most
influential and successful independent record labels.
Raised in Queens, where he worked as a plumber while honing his
guitar skills, Johnny Ramone eventually became a founding member of
The Ramones, one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
Often called the first punk rock outfit, their status is now
legendary. But despite becoming an international star when he was
alive, Johnny never really strayed from his blue-collar roots and
attitude. His bouts of delinquency as a kid might have given way to
true discipline when it came to keeping the band in line, but he
was truly imbued with the angr y-young-man spirit that would
characterise his persona on and off stage. Johnny was the driving
force behind the Ramones, sometimes referred to as a drill
sergeant, bringing order and regiment to the band. This was evident
in the speed, accuracy and intensity of their music. Johnny kept
the band focused and moving forward, ultimately securing their
place in rock history. The Ram ones were inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and two years later, Johnny dies of
cancer, outliving the other two founding members and getting the
last and complete word. Brutally honest, revealing and touching,
this is Johnny Ramones's story and the story of the Ramones from
start to finish, told in his own words and on his own terms. In
addition to his story, the book will contain Johnny's annotated and
graded assessment of the Ramones' albums, a number of eccentric Top
Ten Lists; favourite Elvis films, favourite Republicans [Johnny was
actually pretty conservative], favourite horror films, pages from
his legendary "black books" with notes on concerts, inspirations,
anecdotes and scores of black and white and colour photos, many of
which have not been published before.
'I was 22 years old, a hard-on with a pulse: wretched, vice-ridden,
too much to burn and not enough minutes in a hour to do so' The
action begins in West Des Moines, Iowa, where Corey Taylor,
frontman of heavy metal bands Slipknot and Stone Sour,
systematically set about committing each of the Seven Deadly Sins.
He has picked fights with douche bags openly brandishing guns. He
has set himself on fire at parties and woken up in dumpsters after
cocaine binges. He lost his virginity at eleven. He got rich and
famous and immersed himself in booze, women, and chaos until one
day he realised, suddenly, that he didn't need any of that at all.
Now updated with a brand new chapter, Seven Deadly Sins is a
brutally honest look at 'a life that could have gone horribly wrong
at any turn', and the soul-searching and self-discovery it took to
set it right.
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
In March 1977, John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon of the punk band the Sex
Pistols looked over the Berlin wall onto the grey, militarized
landscape of East Berlin, which reminded him of home in London.
Lydon went up to the wall and extended his middle finger. He didn't
know it at the time, but the Sex Pistols' reputation had preceded
his gesture, as young people in the "Second World" busily
appropriated news reports on degenerate Western culture as punk
instruction manuals. Soon after, burgeoning Polish punk impresario
Henryk Gajewski brought the London punk band the Raincoats to
perform at his art gallery and student club-the epicenter for
Warsaw's nascent punk scene. When the Raincoats returned to
England, they found London erupting at the Rock Against Racism
concert, which brought together 100,000 "First World" UK punks and
"Third World" Caribbean immigrants who contributed their cultures
of reggae and Rastafarianism. Punk had formed networks reaching
across all three of the Cold War's "worlds". The first global
narrative of punk, Punk Crisis examines how transnational punk
movements challenged the global order of the Cold War, blurring the
boundaries between East and West, North and South, communism and
capitalism through performances of creative dissent. As author
Raymond A. Patton argues, punk eroded the boundaries and political
categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new
framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through
this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of
global neoliberalism.
Founded by guitarist Mick Jones and fronted by the legendary Joe
Strummer the Clash had the charisma of Elvis the integrity of the
Beatles and the swagger of the Rolling Stones. Through a series of
influential singles and stirring concerts the Clash not only
outlasted their rivals the Sex Pistols but also prospered and broke
through in the US of A a feat matched by no other UK punk-rock
band.THWith the classic ELondon CallingE and revolutionary triple
album ESandinista!E the Clash helped popularize both reggae and
hip-hop thereby indoctrinating the record buying public to world
music. By 1982 members of the Clash found themselves not only with
a hit album (ECombat RockE) but also playing opening sets during
the Who's first retirement tour. It appeared the Clash would fill
this gap. It was not to be. A series of self-inflicted wounds led
to a legendary downfall mere months after appearing in front on
their largest audience ever at the U.S. Festival in 1983. Strummer
and bassist Paul Simonon soldiered on with the underrated Clash
Round Two but eventually disintegrated under the weight of their
manager's mind games.THIn EThe Clash FAQE author Gary J. Jucha
covers the band's inception and emergence in the early British punk
scene all of the studio albums as well as bootlegs the band's
success in the U.S. the lineup shifts tours and more. Fresh in its
approach and broad in scope this an essential volume for every fan.
The acclaimed and wildly outlandish inside account of Britain's
most notorious club, The Hacienda--a story of gangsters, drugs,
violence, and great beats
In the 1980s, The Hacienda was one of the most famous venues in
the history of clubbing--a celebrated cultural icon alongside
Studio 54, CBGB, and the Whiskey a Go Go--until its tragic
demise.
Founded by New Order and Factory Records, The Hacienda hosted
gigs by such legendary acts as the Smiths, Bauhaus, Grandmaster
Flash, Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, Happy Mondays, and Stone Roses; gave
birth to the "Madchester" scene; became the cathedral for acid
house; and laid the tracks for rave culture and today's electronic
dance music. But over the course of its near fifteen-year run,
"Madchester" descended into "Gunchester" as gangs, drugs, greed,
and a hostile police force decimated the dream.
New Order cofounder and bassist Peter Hook provides an up-close
and visceral look at this cultural touchstone and it's rise and
fall. The Hacienda is a funny, horrifying, and wild story of
success, idealism, naivete, and greed--of an incredible time and
place that changed the face and sound of modern music.
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.
Christmas Day 1977, a day to be spent with family and loved ones,
unless of course you'd decided to spend it with The Sex Pistols.
The punk band, at the centre of a tabloid frenzy and banned from
just about every venue in the country, had booked themselves into a
small club in Huddersfield to perform a benefit in support of
striking West Yorkshire fire fighters. That evening, the band took
to the stage to perform what would become their final UK gig. There
to capture the chaos was photographer Kevin Cummins. No stranger to
The Sex Pistols, he'd been there at that gig at Manchester's Lesser
Free Trade Hall just 18 months previously. Kevin incurred the fury
of his own family to forgo Christmas in order to travel across The
Pennines to document the event. Every frame Kevin shot is here, for
the first time, in this book of more than 150 colour and black and
white photographs, each beautifully capturing Johnny Rotten, Sid
Vicious, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook as they play together for the
last time in their home country. Just weeks later The Pistols would
break up and a year later, Sid would be dead. "You've had the
Queen's speech. Now you're going to get the Sex Pistols at
Christmas. Enjoy." - Johnny Rotten
In his iconic musical travelogue Heavy Metal Islam, Mark LeVine
first brought the views and experiences of a still-young generation
to the world. In We'll Play till We Die, he joins with this
generation's leading voices to write a definitive history of the
era, closing with a cowritten epilogue that explores the meanings
and futures of youth music from North Africa to Southeast Asia.
We'll Play till We Die dives into the revolutionary music cultures
of the Middle East and larger Muslim world before, during, and
beyond the waves of resistance that shook the region from Morocco
to Pakistan. This sequel to Mark LeVine's celebrated Heavy Metal
Islam shows how some of the world's most extreme music not only
helped inspire and define region-wide protests, but also
exemplifies the beauty and diversity of youth cultures throughout
the Muslim world. Two years after Heavy Metal Islam was published
in 2008, uprisings and revolutions spread like wildfire. The young
people organizing and protesting on the streets-in dozens of cities
from Casablanca to Karachi-included the very musicians and fans
LeVine spotlighted in that book. We'll Play till We Die revisits
the groundbreaking stories he originally explored, sharing what has
happened to these musicians, their music, their politics, and their
societies since then. The book covers a stunning array of
developments, not just in metal and hip hop scenes, but with emo in
Baghdad, mahraganat in Egypt, techno in Beirut, and more. LeVine
also reveals how artists have used global platforms like YouTube
and SoundCloud to achieve unprecedented circulation of their music
outside corporate or government control. The first collective
ethnography and biography of the post-2010 generation, We'll Play
till We Die explains and amplifies the radical possibilities of
music as a revolutionary force for change.
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.
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the
Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. At the
turn of the 21st century, the Brazilian punk and hardcore music
scene joined forces with political militants to foster a new social
movement that demanded the universal right to free public
transportation. These groups collaborated in numerous venues and
media: music shows, protests, festivals, conferences, radio
stations, posters, albums, slogans, and digital and printed
publications. Throughout this time, the single demand for free
public transportation reconceptualized notions of urban space in
Brazil and led masses of people across the country to protest. This
book shows how the anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeoisie stance present
in the discourse of a number of Brazilian bands that performed from
the late 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century in the
underground music scenes of Florianopolis and Sao Paulo encountered
a reverberation in the rhetoric emanating from the Campaign for the
Free Fare, subsequently known as the Free Fare Movement (Movimento
Passe Livre, or MPL). This allowed the engaged bands and the
movement for free public transportation to contribute to each
other's development. The book also includes reflections on the Bus
Revolt that occurred in the northeastern city of Salvador,
unveiling traces of the punk and anarcho-punk movements, and the
Revolution Carnivals that occurred in the city of Belo Horizonte,
an event that mixed lectures, vegetarianism, protests, soccer, and
punk rock music.
After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern
English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and
synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and
Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these
artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed
possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the
record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art
punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and
took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding
electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the
fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how
England's state-funded education policy brought together art
students from different social classes to create a fertile ground
for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with
band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the
groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry
hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their
stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional
music scene of lasting international significance.
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