A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century. An ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the false distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture in favour of a borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are part of the same vision. Here is the triumphant vindication of the alienated suburban dandy. A cast of thousands, a gallery of Britain's finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell & Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy's, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf, The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three, Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks, Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond, etc, etc.

"I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them. Whether they are good or bad is beside the point..." A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic miracle' he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with "arrows, signs, advertisements"; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced. He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war... Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of Guerra's birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell, Equilibrium remains a relevant, powerful, and intensely visual account of a truly (post-)modern man.

From 1976 to 1978, the young photographer Simon Barker was a member of the "Bromley Contingent"--a group of avid Sex Pistols fans who comprised the group's inner circle at the height of the punk movement. Many of them, such as Jordan and Siouxsie Sioux, were notorious for their daredevil dress sense, and several--such as Sioux, Steven Severin, Adam Ant, Poly Styrene, Billy Idol, Viv Albertine and Ari Up--went on to form some of the most important bands of the era. This compilation of previously unseen photographs by Barker shows these founders of punk in their earliest incarnations--in bedrooms and kitchens, at public gigs and private parties--before media and commerce sunk their claws into punk's iconoclastic look and class politics. Taken with the simplest and cheapest pocket cameras, the photographs in this collection constitute Barker's "family album for the years 1976 to 1978." In the spirit of the Pistols' "God Save the Queen," the volume closes with a photographic sequence taken by Barker during the 1976 Jubilee celebrations, which shows Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu hobnobbing with the Queen of England in the royal procession.

A unique tribute from David Bowie's official photographer and creative partner, Mick Rock, compiled in 2015, with Bowie's blessing. In 1972, David Bowie released his groundbreaking album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. With it landed Bowie's Stardust alter ego: a glitter-clad, mascara-eyed, sexually ambiguous persona who kicked down the boundaries between male and female, straight and gay, fact and fiction into one shifting and sparkling phenomenon of '70s self-expression. Together, Ziggy the album and Ziggy the stage spectacular propelled the softly spoken Londoner into one of the world's biggest stars. A key passenger on this glam trip into the stratosphere was fellow Londoner and photographer Mick Rock. Rock bonded with Bowie artistically and personally, immersed himself in the singer's inner circle, and, between 1972 and 1973, worked as the singer's photographer and videographer. This collection brings together spectacular stage shots, iconic photo shoots, as well as intimate backstage portraits. It celebrates Bowie's fearless experimentation and reinvention, while offering privileged access to the many facets of his personality and fame. Through the aloof and approachable, the playful and serious, the candid and the contrived, the result is a passionate tribute to a brilliant and inspirational artist whose creative vision will never be forgotten.

A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits - books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century. Re-make/Re-model tells the little known and fascinating story of the individuals and circumstances which combined to form the groundbreaking band Roxy Music -- how the art school avant-garde of the 1960s met the sweat, luck and attitude of chart-topping pop. Written with the co-operation of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera, this is also the definitive account of a new pop vision that would dominate the 1970s. From student digs and provincial nightclubs to emerald-green eyeshadow and fake leopard skin, Re-make/Re-model is about a band which invented an era.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

In the special edition to celebrate the opening of the Gilbert & George Centre in London, writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell explores the paradise behind The Paradisical Pictures; the thirty-five artworks made by Gilbert & George in 2019. The special edition of The Paradisical Pictures is created to celebrate the opening of the Gilbert & George Centre in East London. It features 11 different metallic foils on the cover and a pink foil edging around the book. Writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell explores the paradise behind The Paradisical Pictures; the thirty-five artworks made by Gilbert & George in 2019. The artists’ work confounds and rejects all art historical classification or affiliation to other schools or movements in art. As affirmed by The Paradisical Pictures, there is no formalist, aesthetic or conceptual precedent to the ideology and vision they convey with such intensity. The paintings are fantastical, allegorical, narrative, representational, psychedelic, absurdist, modern yet archaic, surrealist-grotesque, inflected with both tragedy and comedy, filled with pathos, touchingly eloquent of human frailty, age and exhaustion. The art of Gilbert & George is a visionary one above all, which reports from a cosmic journey through life that begins on the streets of London. The Paradisical Pictures suggest a chapter in a story that has been unfolding before them and will continue beyond them. This paradise is not a destination but a stage on a longer journey. It is a dream of paradise and an exploration of an archetype that is both secular and sacred. The paradise of these Paradisical Pictures proposes a more ambivalent view – a place of biomorphic mutation, exhaustion, watchfulness and possession.

A book documenting Michael Craig-Martin's installation of twelve new large-scale works in the gardens at Chatsworth House. Each work is an immense, vibrantly coloured line drawing in space, fabricated in steel. The book also documents a concurrent exhibition curated by Craig-Martin at Chatsworth House, including sculptures from the Devonshire Collection, in which Craig-Martin has swapped their traditional bases for bright pink plinths and a visually arresting selection of drawings from the Old Master Drawings Cabinet, including drawings by Hans Holbein, Annibale Carracci, and Ghirlandaio.

The novelist, writer, curator and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell has written extensively for museums and galleries, along with art publications as diverse as Frieze and The Burlington Magazine, approaching visual art through its cultural context, the lens of the recent past and prolonged looking. Bracewell's art writing focuses on detailed descriptions of works of art, expanding their interpretation to include media, politics, music, poetry and other areas of cultural production. By exploring connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and subcultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists, he relates their work to its broader cultural context. This collection of texts reads like a history of British art (and the UK itself) from the 1950s to the 2010s, featuring artists such as Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George, John Stezaker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Leigh Bowery, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. Each essay is accompanied by an illustration selected by Bracewell, and the publication concludes with a body of autobiographical writings.

The most comprehensive monograph to date on the British artist and writer loved for his witty book-cover-inspired canvases, now updated with forty of his latest works Harland Miller's creativity as both artist and writer culminates in his iconic paintings of battered book covers with cleverly invented titles. Initially appropriating the classic Penguin paperback before devising his own unique designs, Miller combines aspects of pop art, abstraction, and figurative painting to create highly coveted artworks that have won him a cult following. This monograph covers nearly twenty years of his paintings, and features specially commissioned essays by eminent art writers exploring different aspects of his practice and has been updated with forty of his latest works.

Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.' - Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail This beautifully illustrated catalogue showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show "Love" at The Approach, London. Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century - products of modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams and the gaze. A sense of romance pervades Stezaker's imagery. As demonstrated most dramatically by the artist's 'Love' series (2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer's gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling, glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising 'Love' resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness. Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.

Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media. This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 together for the first time. Accompanying full-colour illustrations and a series of installation views of Stezaker's work at The Approach, London, an essay by art critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker's practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.

With his memorably titled 1956 collage "Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?," British artist Richard Hamilton (born 1922) heralded the British Pop revolution; and with his 1967 "Swingeing London" series of prints, which depicted the arrest of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser, Hamilton's art entered the general public consciousness. But unlike so many Pop artists, Hamilton was never an uncritical or ambivalent advocate of postwar society, and he has often agitated directly against it, producing a great deal of openly political, satirical work that assaults both consumer culture at large and more immediate political events. This monograph, published for Hamilton's 2010 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London (his first exhibition since 1992), brings together Hamilton's famous "protest" paintings as well as newer political works and features essays by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michael Bracewell.

MOVED FROM SPRING 09. MAY CANCEL ENTIRELY. REVIEW DURING FALL PRODUCTION. British artist Simon Periton is known for his intricate paper cut-outs, but has recently expanded his technique to create dramatic and complex works on glass with spray paint. Through layering and image mutation, he creates strange, shadowed, metamorphic creatures caught between landscape and domestic interior. This volume is the first to document the glass paintings.

In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert & George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange, determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant 'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

This landmark book reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget Riley (b.1931), from some of her earliest to very recent projects, providing a unique record of the work of an artist still very much at the height of her powers. Essays from leading scholars and commentators on Riley's work will make this title the authority on Riley's practice. In the last decade, Riley has continued to push her practice considerably, producing several large-scale site-specific wall paintings as well as continuing to develop new paintings. This book will explore these recent developments. It will also examine the notable influence that other artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley's work.

Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of pop art, and Bryan Ferry's tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more, Roxy is also the account of how pop art, the avant garde underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the sixties was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism, nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.

He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book "England is Mine" as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell, celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a "cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read "When Surface Was Depth" and discover why "Time Out" has called Michael Bracewell, in a word, "terrific."