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.

During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.

Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk is the first book-length portrait of punk as a musical style with an emphasis on how punk developed in relation to changing ideas of race in American society from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawing on musical analysis, archival research, and new interviews, Damaged provides fresh interpretations of race and American society during this period and illuminates the contemporary importance of that era. Evan Rapport outlines the ways in which punk developed out of dramatic changes to America's cities and suburbs in the postwar era, especially with respect to race. The musical styles that led to punk included transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk. Following these approaches, punk itself reflected new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, the changing environments of American suburbs and cities, and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. Throughout the book, Rapport also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.

As the satanic President Razour attempts to bring forward Armageddon to prevent humanity repenting, the fate of us all rests in the hands of Cleric20, a hedonistic loner with a chequered past, and his robot sidekick, GiX. An action-packed literary shock to the senses that mixes flights of comic fantasy with bouts of brutal violence. Mankind's only hope seems to be having a very bad day. Can Cleric20 halt Razour's devilish plans after an experimental bioweapon deployed to kill him accidentally gives him superpowers? Has the Devil inadvertently created a hero who could actually stop him? Little can prepare you for this spiritually-charged, cyber-noir thrill ride.

On their debut, The Clash famously claimed to be "bored with the USA," but The Clash wasn't a parochial record. Mick Jones' licks on songs such as "Hate and War" were heavily influenced by classic American rock and roll, and the cover of Junior Murvin's reggae hit "Police and Thieves" showed that the band's musical influences were already wide-ranging. Later albums such as Sandinista! and Combat Rock saw them experimenting with a huge range of musical genres, lyrical themes and visual aesthetics. The Clash Takes on the World explores the transnational aspects of The Clash's music, lyrics and politics, and it does so from a truly transnational perspective. It brings together literary scholars, historians, media theorists, musicologists, social activists and geographers from Europe and the US, and applies a range of critical approaches to The Clash's work in order to tackle a number of key questions: How should we interpret their negotiations with reggae music and culture? How did The Clash respond to the specific socio-political issues of their time, such as the economic recession, the Reagan-Thatcher era and burgeoning neoliberalism, and international conflicts in Nicaragua and the Falkland Islands? How did they reconcile their anti-capitalist stance with their own success and status as a global commodity? And how did their avowedly inclusive, multicultural stance, reflected in their musical diversity, square with the experience of watching the band in performance? The Clash Takes on the World is essential reading for scholars, students and general readers interested in a band whose popularity endures.