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

On the day you were born, you were imprinted with a plan and purpose-elegant patterns that can be read to see who you really are and what your true calling is. And, like your own personal tide table, the ebbs and flows of each phase of your life were set into motion on the day of your birth. Based on ancient Chinese principles of balance and health, this book gives you a rich understanding of your hidden symmetry: the intricate inner design that influences who you are and how your life unfolds. This book is not about astrology or numerology; it is based on thousands of years of research about how time moves in natural patterns and profoundly affects your life. You can use this knowledge to discover the themes running through your life experience, tap into your core strengths, find lasting love, and do your best work in the world. Jean Haner shows you how to ride the waves instead of fight the current of your life, learn how to make best use of what's coming in future years, and understand why things happened as they did in the past. Jean will guide you to discover who you really came here to be, recognise the true nature of everyone you meet, and break free of old limitations-and create a life of conscious vitality, joy, ease and love! 'The wisdom Jean Haner presents in Your Hidden Symmetry has been valuable in my own life over the years. I highly recommend it as a way to love and accept yourself, as well as the way your life is unfolding. I'm delighted to contribute the affirmations in this book to support your journey!' Louise L. Hay, the New York Times best-selling author of You Can Heal Your Life 'Your Hidden Symmetry will help you to know yourself, accept yourself, and be true to who you really are. Jean Haner presents an ancient wisdom for living and authentic life. Her work is a gift to the world.' Robert Holden, Ph.D., author of Shift Happens! and Loveability 'With grace and wisdom born of an innate understanding of the human spirit, Jean will gently guide you down the path to profound self-understanding in this heartfelt book. Highly recommended!' Denise Linn, author of Soul Coaching and Sacred Space

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

Told in personal interviews, this is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown. The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Terry Johnson, Ryan "Rymodee" Modee, Gloria Diaz, Skott Cowgill, and others tell of playing in bands including This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, operating local businesses such as End of the Line Cafe, forming feminist support groups, and creating zines and art. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of living, acceptance for the marginalized in a rapidly changing world, and building a sense of family from the ground up. Including photos by Cynthia Connolly and Mike Brodie, A Punkhouse in the Deep South illuminates many individual lives and creative endeavors that found a home and thrived in one of the oldest continuously inhabited punkhouses in the United States.

Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album's cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history-relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself to the band's singular approach and response to punk rock. Instead of employing overt political ideology and abrasive sounds to rebel against the status quo, Young Marble Giants filled their songs with restraint, ambiguity, and silence. The trio opened up their music to new sounds and ideas that redefined punk's rules of rebellion. Where did their rebellious ideas and impulses come from? By tracing Colossal Youth's artistic origins from Ancient Greece to the 20th-century avant-garde, Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero uncover the intricacies of Young Marble Giants' idiosyncratic take on music in the post-punk age. Emerging from the gaps in between the notes are new ways of hearing the history of punk, the political and economic turbulence of the late 1970s, and the world that surrounds us right now.

THESE ARE THE WORDS THAT CAME TO ME. NO MATTER HOW THEY GOT HERE, THEY DID THE F***ING JOB. Iggy Pop hasn't left a mark on music; he's left it battered and bruised, too. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, here for the first time are his selected lyrics, complete with stunning original photographs, illustrations, alongside Iggy and others' reflections on a genre-defining music career that spans five decades. Coinciding with a new album, FREE, this is the ultimate book for every rock and roll fan.

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.

'Meal Deal with the Devil' combines a five-song CD from the devious San Francisco Bay Area musical satirists, Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, with an accompanying read-along storybook, bringing their twisted humour to the page.

'A raw and raging celebration of music . . . astounding.' Megan Bradbury 'Funny, filthy, erudite, and rude.' Carl Shuker 'A magnificent novel.' Alan McMonagle During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band's four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, traversing time and investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, violence and revelling in transcendence through the act of art. With decades passed and compelled by his wife's failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty. Dance Prone is a novel of music, ritual and love. It is live, tense and corporeal. Full of closely observed details of indie-rock, of punk infused performance, the road and the players' relationship to violence, hate and peace. Set during both the post-punk period and the present day, Dance Prone was born out of a love of the underground and indie rock scenes of the 1980s, a fascination for their role in the cultural apparatus of memory, social decay and its reconstruction.

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* The brand new memoir from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Road Beneath My Feet. Taking 36 songs from his back catalogue, folk-punk icon Frank Turner explores his songwriting process. Find out the stories behind the songs forged in the hedonistic years of the mid-2000s North London scene, the ones perfected in Nashville studios, and everything in between. Some of these songs arrive fully-formed, as if they've always been there, some take graft and endless reworking to find 'the one'. In exploring them all, Turner reflects with eloquence, insight and self-deprecating wit on exactly what it is to be a songwriter. From love songs and break-up songs to political calls-to-arms; songs composed alone in a hotel room or in soundcheck with the Sleeping Souls, this brilliantly written memoir - featuring exclusive photos of handwritten lyrics and more - is a must-have book for FT fans and anyone curious about how to write music.

During the 1970s, the synthesizer spurred many fundamental shifts in the mechanisms of music-making. Along with the popularization of the musical aesthetics established by both the punk and post-punk movements, the synthesizer led to ground-breaking effects and processes. Dark Waves examines the role of the synthesizer in shaping the dark and dystopian sound of electronic music in 1970s Britain and is the first collected musicological analysis of The Normal, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and John Foxx. Many of these acts, dark in content, presentation and manner, would go on to influence the more commercial sound of 1980s synth pop, which in turn shaped mainstream electronic music today.

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.

A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A joy to read' Guardian 'I loved this book' Irvine Welsh 'What a story! I adored it' Lauren Laverne As a DJ and broadcaster on radio, tv and the live music scene, Annie has been an invigorating and necessarily disruptive force. She walked in the door at Radio One in 1970 as its first female broadcaster. Fifty years later she continues to be a DJ and tastemaker who commands the respect of artists, listeners and peers across the world. Hey Hi Hello tells the story of those early days at Radio One, the Ground Zero moment of punk and the arrival of acid house and the Second Summer of Love in the late 80s. Funny, warm and candid to a fault, including encounters with Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, The Beatles and interviews with Little Simz and Billie Eilish, this is a portrait of an artist without whom the past fifty years of British culture would have looked very different indeed.

Inaugural pick for the Pitchfork Book Club GQ's One of the Best Books to Read Right Now How can so many people pledge allegiance to punk, something with no fixed identity? Depending on who and where you are, punk can be an outlet, excuse, lifestyle, escapism, conversation, community, ideology, sales category, social movement, punishable offense, badge of authenticity, reason to drink beer forever, or an aesthetic of belligerent incompetence. And if someone has a strong belief about what punk is, odds are they have even stronger feelings about what punk is not. Sam McPheeters championed many different versions. Over the course of two decades, he fronted Born Against, released dozens of records and fanzines, and toured seventeen times across the northern hemisphere. In this collection of essays, profiles, criticism, and personal history, he examines the diverse realms he intersected--New York hardcore, Riot Grrrl, Gilman street, the hidden enclaves of Olympia, and New England, and downtown Los Angeles--and the forces of mental illness and creative inspiration that drove him, and others, in the first place.

The product of years of research, travel, and countless conversations, "Burning Britain" is the true story of the UK punk scene from 1980 to 1984 told for the first time by the bands and labels that created it. Covering the country region by region, author Ian Glasper profiles legendary bands like Vice Squad, Angelic Upstarts, Blitz, Anti-Nowhere League, Cockney Rejects, and the UK Subs as well as more obscure groups like Xtract, The Skroteez, and Soldier Dolls through hundreds of new interviews and photographs. As the 1970s closed the media was quick to declare punk dead, but a new generation of even more aggressive and political bands were announcing their presence through some of the most primal and potent music ever committed to plastic. This book is the definitive guide to that previously overlooked era.

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.