Popoff's easy to read book utilises his celebrated timeline with quotes methodology, allowing for drop-ins on all aspects of Alice's busy life. The author has made use of his extensive archive of interviews with Alice and the band as well as producers, designers and even The Amazing Randi, world-renowned magician and inventor of Alice's legendary guillotine prop. Welcome to My Nightmare is an immense addition to Alice Cooper scholarship. Alice Cooper was one of the biggest concert draws in the seventies with a string of gold and platinum albums to his name. Hits include "I'm Eighteen," "Be My Lover," "Under My Wheels," "School's Out," "Elected," & "Billion Dollar Babies". Alice continued to shake pop consciousness with Welcome to My Nightmare and a string of hit ballads. He appeared regularly on TV and talk shows. Following a debilitating drug and alcohol addiction and subsequent notorious dark period in the early eighties which is addressed in the book, Alice returned to gold and platinum status with albums like Trash and Hey Stoopid, featuring smash singles "Poison" and "Feed My Frankenstein." He's never stopped touring and being a multi-media whirlwind since-Alice, with his pioneering use of facepaint, remains one of the most famous faces in America. Shockingly, there has not been a comprehensive Alice Cooper book since the eighties. The key here is the rich content Popoff brings to the project. Welcome to My Nightmare is sure to impress the Alice expert and novice alike, with new revelations and interviews turning up page after page.

Through a confluence of grinding hard rock grooves, pioneering electronics and liquid lighting, Dave Brock and his assembled astronauts of mind and space have been defining for more than fifty years now what it means to be the ultimate cult band. Ripping into the public consciousness with the Space Ritual live album of 1973, Hawkwind have never looked back, discovering new ways to equate the subatomic with the infinite, the endless void of space with totality, using the exotic language of their ever-evolving yet complex musical language, one that defies genre classification, but perhaps creates a genre all its own, namely space rock. Accompanying their more than thirty studio albums and myriad companion pieces along the way are the graphics thereof, visuals that further attempt to explain themes that are hard to articulate. Hawkwind: A Visual Biography concentrates the third eye on this part of the package, presenting pretty pictures of record covers, promo items, advertisements, ticket stubs, paper goods pertaining to side-projects and numerous photos, most previously unpublished, of Brock and crew resplendent in their live space, in hopes that the Hawk manifesto just might become a little more knowable. Aiding in that cause, Martin Popoff has provided a detailed timeline of the band’s complicated and dramatic career goings-on, helping to guide one’s way through each year and era, each hiring and firing and misfiring, each cluster of notions, audio magic potions, each sailing upon inter-stellar topographic oceans. The ultimate aim is to send older fans as well as the next generation of blaster-offer back to the original scriptures, the studio albums serving as space-flung signposts, in search of the charming and astounding sounds that gave rise to Hawkwind: A Visual Biography.

Quite simply, Martin Popoff’s Sabotage! Black Sabbath in the Seventies marks the most intensive analysis of Black Sabbath’s first eight albums ever attempted. This is a big book—129,000 words long, every song analysed in detail, loads of first-hand interview footage from close to 50 interrogations. In the baking, Popoff interviewed all of the principles—Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward—repeatedly, along with myriad other folks who are part of this remarkable tale. Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Sabotage, Never Say Die and Technical Ecstasy… these are the building blocks of heavy metal, and within these awesome audio chapters, Popoff breaks down each and every song on each of these reverberating and cannonating records, while Geezer offers explanation of the lyrics, Bill poetically explains why these songs resonate and Tony and Oz look on with their characteristic sense of bemusement. Also touched upon are the band’s torrid troubles with money and management and drugs and booze, as well as tour tales, album cover stories and production tips ‘n’ tricks. Also included are two four-page sections of colour plates. All told, it’s everything needed to send the reader back to the catalogue, headphones on, for a second listen of this landmark run of records spanning 1970’s self-titled debut to 1978’s Never Say Die, the shambling, controversial last gasp before Ozzy’s shocking ouster from the ranks.

Megadeth's run of thrash classics from the mid eighties through to the nineties continue to be celebrated in the metal community long after leader Dave Mustaine's band mates have been discarded to the sands of time-save one, Dave "Jr" Ellefson. Along the way there's Mustaine's pathology with his ex-friends in Metallica but also a hell of a lot of killer metal as the band works its way up through Peace Sells and So Far, So Good... So What! through to the superlative metal classics, namely Rust In Peace and Countdown To Extinction. Later came Cryptic Writings and Risk that threatened to kill the band but the reconstitution of Megadeth after its demoralising decline and then deflating dispersal at the destructive hand of Mustaine is a story untold... until now. But it's a tale worth telling for its instructiveness on how to rebuild and maintain a career. Quite simply the recent Megadeth story spanning the albums The World Needs A Hero through to Super Collider includes some of the beast and heaviest Megadeth ever committed to record. Celebrate Mustaine's vision track-by-track with top author Martin Popoff. With over sixty books to his name, Popoff applies his tried and tested methodology to a head-crunching canon of work that is truly as strong at the recent end of the spectrum as it is with the classics you all know and love.

Having written the first book ever on UFO, 2005's long out-of-print Shoot Out the Lights, Martin Popoff, author of over seventy rock books, has now greatly expanded and rewritten the later years material from that title, bringing us now Lettin' Go: UFO in the `80s & `90s. Popoff brings to the project new interviews with the key members throughout the decades, along with a substantial amount of new research to offer what is now the only book to focus on the eighties and nineties era of the band that saw huge turbulence amongst the ranks. Utilising his celebrated one album per chapter method, Popoff analyses the complete catalogue from the period of the band where initially Paul Chapman takes over from the departed Michael Schenker for the albums. No Place To Run, The Wild, the Willing and the Innocent, Mechanix and Making Contact. The journey takes us through the albums following the departure of Chapman and bassist Pete Way and concludes with 1995's Walk On Water that sees the classic line-up reunited with Schenker back on guitar before he sensationally walked out on the band after just four shows of the supporting tour. In and around Popoff's famed meticulous analysis of the catalogue, look for lots of tour talk, revealing nightmares surrounding the band's business, and warnings about how the twin demons of drugs and alcohol can slow a band's progress on the way to the top.

In Dominance and Submission: The Blue Oyster Cult Canon, three-time BOC book author Martin Popoff turns the microphone away from himself to moderate a gathered and esteemed panel of Cult experts for deep-dive discussions on every Blue Oyster Cult studio album. No stone is left unturned, as we look at the personalities in the band, every song, every album cover, the band’s highly regarded lyrics as poetry, their music as ground-breaking and genre-defying. Dominance and Submission is set-up in Q&A format, allowing for pure and piercing prose that is also conversational and easy-access. In the end, the author is confident that the wise words from this cabal of music authorities—with Popoff not pulling any punches either, joining in the fun when the door is opened—will have you playing the band’s “canon” with a renewed appreciation as to the complexity laced throughout such albums as Tyranny and Mutation, Agents of Fortune—with its career defining hit “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”—Spectres, Fire of Unknown Origin and the daunting Imaginos. But have no fear, Martin and his team have taken us right up to the band’s effusively received comeback album, The Symbol Remains, bringing band and fan full circle—umlauts included, of course. Finally, augmenting the learning (and listening) experience, Dominance and Submission provides a plethora of images that make these essays on the band’s fifteen albums that much more visceral. Bottom line: if you thought Martin had covered everything you need to know in his definitive Agents of Fortune: The Blue Oyster Cult Story, think again—the analysis proffered by his panel even sent Popoff back to the sacred texts for a rock ‘n’ roll re-imagining. If he’s been made smarter by what these guys have to say, you will be too.

Rock City, Narita, Fire Down Under, Restless Breed, Born in America... These are the pioneering, superlative heavy metal records that represent the classic first decade of Brooklyn's Riot's, before the band would break up, eventually storming back with Thundersteel and The Privilege of Power, existing to this day as Riot V after the shocking death from Crohn's disease of guitarist and leader Mark Reale. Riot's is a tale of opportunities missed, of a band ahead of the curve, and of a band from which both its classic era lead singers - Guy Speranza and Rhett Forrester - are now dead, as is, of course, Mark Reale, a quiet man who, fatefully, wanted to leave the business to others and just play his heavy metal. But this book is not just about the '75 to '85 period of the band that spawned one of the finest metal records of all time, 1981's Fire Down Under. Even if the classics framed by those ten years get the full, dedicated chapter, track-by-track Popoff treatment, the subsequent rich and substantial catalogue of the band is discussed as well, right up to the present day where Riot shines on. But still, the focus is on songs like `Warrior', `49er', `Road Racin'', `Outlaw', `Don't Hold Back', `Altar of the King', `Violent Crimes', `Vigilante Killer' and of course the insanely anthemic `Swords and Tequila', as we celebrate a New York institution that is perhaps the shining example of the term, "honorary New Wave of British Heavy Metal" band.

An updated version of Loud 'n' Proud: Fifty Years of Nazareth, drawing on copious images and items of memorabilia, this large format 240-page book is a treasure trove for Nazareth devotees — crammed full of live and off stage shots that portray the band’s journey through the decades. It also includes loads of super cool memorabilia including backstage passes, gig posters, media adverts and much more, all reproduced on high quality art paper. From the early days of the seventies through to the current day, nestling alongside the wonderful imagery, the band’s whole career is documented by esteemed rock writer Martin Popoff who was assisted through the whole narrative by Nazareth’s founder and only remaining original member Pete Agnew. Popoff also interviewed Agnew for the book in addition to previous interviews the author has conducted, not only with the bass player extraordinaire but with many other band members past and present, all neatly laid out in a timeline, making this the essential go to Nazareth book.

In this scintillating sequel to Sabotage! Black Sabbath in the Seventies, Martin Popoff blows up the kaleidoscopic narrative of the Sabs over the ensuing twenty years, dissecting each and every of the band's ten studio albums and two (and-a-half) live albums produced over that time period. So this is the book where we hear the gripes, snipes, swipes and thumbs-up likes from Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, Tony Martin and finally once more Ozzy Osbourne, as they remark upon this institution coddled by the anchor of the band Tony Iommi, who valiantly held Black Sabbath together through many years of blood, sweat and Tyrs. Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules, Live Evil, Born Again, Seventh Star, The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, Tyr, Dehumanizer, Cross Purposes, Forbidden and finally, extensively broken down, Reunion... they're all here, song by song, the hirings and the firings highlighted and explained. Incorporating talk from over 60 interviews conductive with band members and other relevant parties over 25 years, make no mistake-this is the most in-depth examination of the band during this timeframe ever executed. So come one and all, re-love modern-era Black Sabbath all over again-you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much dastardly doom there is from Tony Iommi that you need to know and embrace once again.

The astonishing run of albums unleashed upon an unsuspecting public within the span of five years created the legend of Alice Cooper that lives on to this day. But we're talking about the original Alice Cooper group here, a band called that with a lead singer also going by that name. In other words, the legend was built by Vincent "Alice Cooper" Furnier, Michael Bruce, Glen Buxton, Dennis Dunaway and "platinum god" Neal Smith. It is all of them working together - along with producer Bob Ezrin - that created the mystique of songs like "I'm Eighteen," "Is It My Body," "Desperado," "Under My Wheels," "Be My Lover," "Elected" and "No More Mr. Nice Guy." And it is all of them working together - along with crack management in Shep Gordon and Joe Greenberg-that created the shock rock buzz that kept the newspapers full of indignation about this band set out to destroy human civilization. Easy Action: The Original Alice Cooper Group tells the story in meticulous chronological detail, from the band's early days in Phoenix as The Spiders, through being broke on the Sunset Strip, followed by a career-reviving relocation to a notorious party house on the outskirts of Pontiac, Michigan. Corroborating the improbable sequence of events is a plethora of stories from the band themselves, who explain how the original Alice Cooper group went from politely ignored pariahs in Los Angeles to international Public Enemies No. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Listen to the guys and their good-natured explanations behind the mayhem, and it soon becomes apparent that the ghoulish makeup around the singer's eyes and the boa constrictor around his neck - not to mention the head-choppings, the hangings and the hard rock - were all served up in good fun. Now it's time for you, dear reader, to join in the fun and see why Alice Cooper was, for a golden moment in time fully 50 years ago now, the most feared and revered act in all of rock 'n' roll.

Yes: A Visual Biography II: 1982 - 2022 documents the progressive rock pioneer's career from the eighties to the present day. Popoff takes you on a journey built around his interviews with Anderson, Bruford, Howe, Squire, Wakeman, Downes, White and many others, the tale unfolds via an exhaustive chronology designed to satisfy the most knowledgeable of Yes fans. Not content with charting the band's history, Popoff covers the major projects outside of the Yes umbrella, such as Asia, GTR and Rick Wakeman's extravaganzas, to paint the whole picture. If you've been moved by albums such as Fly from Here and Heaven and Earth, you'll love this book, which perfectly captures the spirit of progressive rock's first and biggest and best act of crack musicians bent on bending your perceptions of what rock can be. Throughout the book Popoff draws on his own interviews conducted with various band members throughout the last two decades, leaving much of the story to be told in their own words, along with a smattering of album reviews by the author and others. This large format coffee table book is fully illustrated throughout, documenting the story visually from 1982. As well as an abundance of concert images the stunning photographic content is topped off with many off stage shots.Yes A Visual Biography II: 1982 - 2022 will augment any Yes fan's collection.

When the world thinks of heavy metal in its pure, potent, undiluted form, it is none other than the Metal Gods, Judas Priest, that instantly come to mind. Chrome and black leather, studs and whips and chains, a chopper on stage to announce the coming... these are the tools of the trade for Rob Halford and his legendary band of Birmingham bashers. Indeed, the Priest are the bringers of metal's biggest anthems. "Breaking the Law," "Living after Midnight," "Exciter," "Electric Eye," "Victim of Changes," and especially "You've Got Another Thing Comin'"... these are songs woven into the fabric of metal's wild ride, Priest having been there since its origins, revving up crowds as superstars certainly for 30 years of that run. Lifelong fan and preeminent metal historian Martin Popoff examines the Priest's rich legacy from 1974 to 1984, album by album, anthem by anthem, in this hugely expanded update on the early years portion of his long out-of-print Heavy Metal Painkillers book. Having interviewed all the principals in the band repeatedly over the years, Popoff gives a first-hand account of Priest's rocky, often comical ride through the '70s, and through the gold and platinum records of the '80s, expertly detailing the long road to the arena headline status the band now enjoys as heavy metal's proudest ambassadors. Judas Priest: Decade of Domination includes extensive commentary from reclusive drummer Les Binks, along with new interview footage from Tom Allom, Chris Tsangarides, K.K. Downing, Glenn Tipton, Ian Hill, Rob Halford, and various other insiders who are part of the Priest saga during this hallowed, golden era. Also included are tons of memorabilia shots, live photography and two tipped-in colour sections. To reiterate, this is the most extensive analysis ever in book form of: Rocka Rolla, Sad Wings of Destiny, Sin After Sin, Killing Machine/Hell Bent for Leather, Unleashed in the East, British Steel, Point of Entry, Screaming for Vengeance and Defenders of the Faith-song by song, lots of stories, looking at licks and fills, and what's in the right channel and left, lyric analysis... the deepest dive ever on these records.

The Damned are forever in the history books as the first UK punk band to get an album out. Damned Damned Damned was a flamethrower of a record, led by the incendiary violence of "New Rose" (first UK punk single as well) and "Neat Neat Neat," two shocking punk anthems that defined the golden era of the new wave more purely pogo-mad than anything outta The Clash or the Sex Pistols. And the mayhem never let up, with the band already breaking up and reforming (another first!) by 1979 for one of the greatest punk albums of all time, Machine Gun Etiquette (by the way, The Damned were also the first UK punk band to tour America). More punch-ups and gratuitous vandalism ensued as the band expanded its palette through the years. Popoff has wanted to write Lively Arts: The Damned Deconstructed for decades, and now that it's finished, he's been all over video and radio calling it his favourite and best book he's ever done. For in it, Popoff got to analyse monastically - headphones and repeat button at the ready - every damned Damned song across all the albums and every EP and single. This herculean task represented a joy of an exercise from a penmanship point of view, but it was most satisfying in a proselytizing sense - Martin wants everybody joining him in poring over The Damned catalogue in minute detail. Let this long-suffering band of scrapping, scratching cats in a sack know how important and beloved they are before they're all dead!

Let's face it, without the larger-than-life character and imagination of the art that complements it, metal just wouldn't have had the same impact. From the colourful, outlandish, yet sophisticated use of visuals for album artwork and posters, to the immediately recognisable logos of such bands as Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Metallica, Slayer, and a host of others across many subgenres, there's a close-knit relationship between the riffs that thunder from the guitar and the images that have come to represent the songs, anthems, and sheer nature of the beast. Does any other form of music immediately conjure up such evocative and distinctive images as the mere mention of the term "heavy metal" does? The answer is simple: no! From its inception in the 1960s through to today's giants, the art has been closely connected to the music. Every classic album brings to mind a readily identifiable album cover. Each great band has an immediately identifiable logo. All of the landmark gigs have a poster that quintessentially depicts the time, place, and passion of the event. It's all developed so far along the road that, today, the art that has been used to illustrate the music now stands on its own. There are exhibitions of the finest examples created by the truly outstanding artists. These works are collectible in their own right. What might have begun as a way of packaging metal has taken on a life of its own -- moreover, it's even possible to trace the way the genre itself has evolved, and changed, by looking at its art. This book explores the ways in which the art has helped define each of the crucial subgenres that make up the multifaceted and colourful centipede that is metal.

Wild Mood Swings: Disintegrating The Cure Album by Album, Martin Popoff's innovative new project on iconic post-punk pioneers The Cure, celebrates 50 years now since key actor of the band Robert Smith got hold of his first guitar. And the form this celebration takes is a critical analysis of the band's 13 studio albums, utilising a panel of thoughtful and engaging music critics culled from the author's and Marco D'Auria's video channel, The Contrarians. Presented in easy-to-read Q&A format, Martin gathers these wise music swamis into small teams with an aim toward deconstructing and reassembling each album, hopefully generating myriad new ways for the reader and Cure fan to appreciate the band's seminal records, beginning with Three Imaginary Boys in 1979 and ending with 4:13 Dream in 2008. As bonus to the discussion, Popoff has created a detailed timeline linked to each album, echoing the format used for his many celebrated visual biographies issued through Wymer Publishing in recent years. The end result presents a fresh methodology with which to consider a band's catalogue, with the hope being that the mix of hard chronological reference material and freewheeling opinion, review and analysis makes for a lively celebration of-and subsequent richer appreciation for-everything Robert Smith has done for millions of Cure fans around the world, much of it therapeutic, redemptive and in so many inspiring instances, urgently life-saving.

In 1974, Alice Cooper shocked the rock world, scooped up his makeup kit and went solo. Consummated by a legal name change from Vincent Furnier to Alice Cooper, "the man behind the mask" never looked back, writing and recording fully 21 studio albums across a roller-coaster career that is now nearly 60 years on in the business, with almost 50 of that on his own, calling the shots as a man and brand with a plan, often guided by manager Shep Gordon, one of the best in the biz. Feed My Frankenstein: Alice Cooper, the Solo Years charts this action-packed era for Alice, beginning with the smash success of the Welcome to My Nightmare album and tour and hitting a nadir with the blackout years of the early '80s, where Alice nearly died from booze and hard drugs before being brought back by his faith in God and by the good graces of his wife Sheryl. Next came Alice's third wave of major success with Trash and Hey Stoopid, followed by a settling into regular record-making and touring duties, culminating in some of his best work quite recently, with Dirty Diamonds, Along Came a Spider and 2021's Detroit Stories. All of this is celebrated in Feed My Frankenstein, meticulously charted with timeline entries that are extensively explained and corroborated by a gallery of Alice's band members throughout the decades. Helping bring the story to life is a smorgasbord of imagery, from live photography through to all manner of memorabilia, underscoring how visceral the visual has always been for this legendary showman. Get on board and get a sense of how each and every one of Alice's 21 solo albums work, along with an understanding of how absolutely and insanely jam-packed life has been for Alice since 1974 when he and Shep rolled the dice, pooled all their resources and took us on an all-guns-blazing tour of Alice's sleeping brain. Indeed, once rolling, it just never stopped. Next station was Hell, followed by a visit to the asylum and then, down the road apiece, Brutal Planet, Dragontown and finally Michigan for some Detroit Stories. It's all here in red, black and blue - bring your camera.