This is the album that sent a shockwave of empowerment through the nation's cultural underground. In 1985, Olympia, Washington band Beat Happening released their eponymous debut of lo-fi pop songs on K Records and challenged every conception held about music. At the center of the group was the enigmatic Calvin Johnson and his revolutionary vision of artistic creation. His foresight and industriousness allowed him to recruit to the K Records roster other free-spirited artists like Beck, Modest Mouse, and Built to Spill long before they gained widespread acclaim. This book, structured in abecedarian fashion, breaks down the fundamental components that defined Beat Happening's self-titled album. With a foreword by Phil Elverum, it's organized in a light-hearted yet incisive format, each of the book's chapters details a particular facet of the record-band members, historic shows, recording sessions, songs, and ideologies-parts reflecting the album as a whole. These alphabetic ingredients constitute a recipe book for feeding your creative spirit. Here is the story of a band that popularized do-it-yourself projects and home recording with four-track tape machines decades before the digital revolution would extend an open hand to garage bands everywhere. This is the story of musical pioneers. This is Beat Happening.

Like a real life field of dreams Alf Hyslop built it - the Grey Topper music venue in Jacksdale, an obscure Nottinghamshire pit village - and they came - glam kings Sweet, Mud, Bay City Rollers, Hot Chocolate, soul legends Ben E king, Geno Washington, Edwin Starr, reggae greats Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff, heavy metal acts UFO, Judas Priest, Saxon. Then came the punk rock and new wave explosion - The Stranglers, The Vibrators, UK Subs, The Members, The Ruts, Angelic Upstarts, Ultravox, Adam and the Ants, The Pretenders, Toyah, The Specials, Simple Minds. Inevitably with punk, violence flared, culminating in the Angelic Upstarts riot gig that has gone down in Jacksdale folklore. The Palace and the Punks tells the amazing, hilarious (imagine a 1970's Phoenix Nights if Top of the Pops was filmed there), and occasionally sad, true story of the Grey Topper, centred around its last rise and fall and pogo in 1979. From the same author of the acclaimed If the Kids are United. www.manutdbooks.com

If you know what it is, punk is everywhere nowadays - in fashion, in TV ads, in loads of books and in retro mags. And as the characters aren't waxworks but in many cases living beings, some have staggered, tramped or even rocketed back into public life. It's a bit tricky to sort the crap from the class but this unusual book deserves the latter tag. If your world was influenced by Crass, the Levellers or Adam & The Ants, Let's Submerge is for you (Berger has written the definitive work on Crass and also a biog of the Levellers). The anthology is more than memoir - it's a personal take on punk and its place in Berger's life. Built on a superb, rangy interview with Crass linchpin Penny Rimbaud and including in-depth talks with mavericks such as Mark Perry, Marco Pirroni, the late Steven Wells and Spizz, it seeks to unearth what the movement/phenomenon was about and how its protagonists fit with the Berger view that punk was "a place where misfits could be accepted and conformity didn't rule." His choice of subjects might make consensus likely but that is not the point as an unflinching style gets the best out of his interviewees. A key passage in the Mark Perry interview has the priceless line: "My old mate Danny Baker, erstwhile Sniffin' Glue colleague] did an advert for Daz They're a major corporation Give us a break They're destroying the fucking world - why are we working for them? I'm not a particularly political person . . .." Perry also tells a great tale of how he was asked to appear on Baker's edition of This Is Your Life and was chastised by his ma for turning it down. "Even people I respect didn't understand. I don't live by those rules." Wherever their careers have taken them, all have consciously avoided settling in the mainstream. Berger's writing career took him to 3am (not the Daily Mirror column, but 3ammagazine.com - "Whatever it is, we're against it") and the pieces he contributed are to me the hard core of Let's Submerge. They are a riveting set, composed with passion and spiked with insight and humour, covering an unexpectedly wide terrain - drinking at the Ritz, flag-waving nationalism, the virtues of Jeffrey Archer, Crass redux and voting among others. There's also an equally spiky and humorous memoir of a spell of horse-drawn life in Ireland, and quite a bit more. In conclusion, an illuminating interview with the author puts the foregoing into historical perspective. The impression is that while Berger wants to "draw a line" rather than march on as a modern-day torchbearer, the light is unlikely to go out.

A collection of humorous, shocking, and surprising tales about touring from some of underground music's most celebrated musicians.

Joe Strummer was the archetypal citizen artist. As a member of The Clash, Strummer composed some the most important rebel music of the twentieth century. Fusing raw creativity with a humanist global sensibility, he helped convert punk rock from its early associations with reactionary and nihilistic politics into a movement of creative response and world citizenship.Let Fury Have the Hour--the inspiration for D'Ambrosio's extraordinary documentary of the same name--is a unique collection of original writing, interviews, essays, and visual art. Included are essays and photographs by D'Ambrosio and pieces by Chuck D, Billy Bragg, Tom Morello, DJ Spooky, Shepard Fairey, and more, together illustrating how Strummer's work inspired a movement.

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."

With his critically acclaimed "Rip It Up and Start Again," renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds applied a unique understanding to an entire generation of musicians working in the wake of punk rock. Spawning artists as singular as Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, and Devo, postpunk achieved new relevance in the first decade of the twenty-first century through its profound influence on bands such as Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Vampire Weekend. With "Totally Wired" the conversation continues. The book features thirty-two interviews with postpunk's most innovative personalities--such as Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, and Lydia Lunch--alongside an "overview" section of further reflections from Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes. Included among them are John Lydon and PIL, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and art-school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. Reynolds follows these exceptional, often eccentric characters from their beginnings through the highs and lows of postpunk's heyday. Crackling with argument and anecdote, "Totally Wired" paints a vivid portrait of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.

Punk Slash! Musicals is the first book to deal extensively with punk narrative films, specifically British and American punk rock musicals produced from roughly 1978 to 1986. Films such as Jubilee, Breaking Glass, Times Square, Smithereens, Starstruck, and Sid and Nancy represent a convergence between independent, subversive cinema and formulaic classical Hollywood and pop musical genres. Guiding this project is the concept of "slip-sync." Riffing on the commonplace lip-sync phenomenon, "slip-sync" refers to moments in the films when the punk performer "slips" out of sync with the performance spectacle, and sometimes the sound track itself, engendering a provocative moment of tension. This tension frequently serves to illustrate other thematic and narrative conflicts, central among these being the punk negotiation between authenticity and inauthenticity. Laderman emphasizes the strong female lead performer at the center of most of these films, as well as each film's engagement with gender and race issues. Additionally, he situates his analyses in relation to the broader cultural and political context of the neo-conservatism and new electronic audio-visual technologies of the 1980s, showing how punk's revolution against the mainstream actually depends upon a certain ironic embrace of pop culture.

The Clash: trendsetters, icons, revolutionaries. They were the pioneers of British punk rock and their story is steeped in mythology. Many people have an opinion about what made them who they were - this book gives the chance to read the full story, from the band themselves. This is the first official book to be created by the band. With unprecedented access to the Clash archive, this landmark publication brings together previously unseen material - including tour posters, artwork, and photos of the band at home, on stage, in the studio and on the road - with each member telling it like it was, in their own words.

Jeff Turner was raised in Custom House in the East End of London, with seven siblings to share a three-bedroom council house. When the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" hit, his brother Mickey picked up a guitar and Jeff picked up a microphone, and together they stormed the music scene as The Cockney Rejects. The Rejects stood for being young, working class, and not taking anything from anyone, resulting in aggression and violence being the main staple at their shows. However, the madness couldn't last forever, and as chaos at the gigs spiraled out of control, so did the band. Jeff was left dazed and penniless, and here tells his story.

They were the pioneers of American hardcore, forming in California in 1878 and splitting up 8 years later leaving behind them a trail of blood, carnage and brutal, brilliant music. Throughout the years they fought with the police, record industry and their own fans. This is the band's story from the inside, drawing upon exclusive interviews with the group's members, their contemporaries and the groups who were inspired by them. It's also the story of American hardcore music, from the perspective of the group who did more to take the sound to the clubs, squats and community halls in American than any other.