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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Australian artist David Noonan (born 1969) uses found imagery as the basis for his screenprinted canvases and sculptures. Enigmatic figures, printed in grainy black and white or sepia, pose in these elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic rituals. This monograph will be the first comprehensive overview of Noonan's work.

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?

"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.

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.

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.

'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...

Mexico-based artist Stefan Bruggemann, born in 1975, is interested in "words that become pictures" and "pictures that become words." This excellent introduction includes work from 1997 to 2008 in vinyl lettering, neon, wallpaper, paint, cardboard, digital print, marker, glass and mirror. A typical text piece might read, "Looks Conceptual" or "(Vexed)."

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."

During the summer months of 2011, the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst inaugurated a sculpture project on the grounds of the Froh Ussicht estate in Samstagern, Zurich. The project was inspired by Bomarzo, the famous Italian Renaissance garden populated with fantastical and monstrous sculptures and follies (i.e. buildings constructed primarily for the embellishment of a landscape). Artists Pablo Bronstein, Liz Craft, Ida Ekblad, Geoffrey Farmer, Kerstin Kartscher, Ragnar Kjartansson, Fabian Marti, Peter Regli and Thiago Rocha Pitta all devised their own fantastical narratives in response to Bomarzo. "The Garden of Forking Paths" enlarges upon this innovative exhibition with reproductions of installed works, and essays by some of the finest architecture and garden theorists and writers on the history of follies and the interaction between art and garden: Lars Bang Larsen, Michael Bracewell, Horst Bredekamp, Brian Dillon, Patrick Eyres, Heike Munder, Anthony Vidler and Catherine Wood.