Showing titles in Music

From the illicit reggae blues dances and acid-rock free festivals of the 1970s, through the ecstasy-fuelled Second Summer of Love in 1988, to the increasingly corporate dance music culture of the post-Covid era, Party Lines is a groundbreaking new history of UK dance music, exploring its pivotal role in the social, political and economic shifts on which modern Britain has been built.

Music is finite, opinions are endless. On The Album Years podcast, long term friends, collaborators and music nerds Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness discuss and bicker about their favourite music released during the golden album years, which they reckon to be from around 1965 to the end of the millennium. Each episode focuses on a single year picked at random. At the end of each episode they pick their personal favourites and the album they think had the most long-term impact on music. Can you guess which albums they will pick?

Amelia Rose is burned-out from years of maintaining her public image as pop princess Rae Rose. Inspired by her favourite Audrey Hepburn film, Roman Holiday, she drives off in the middle of the night for a break in Rome...Rome, Kentucky, that is. Running the pie shop his grandmother left him, Noah Walker is busy enough as it is. After finding Amelia on his front lawn in her broken-down car, he decides to let her temporarily stay in his guest room. As they grow closer, Noah starts to see a new side to Amelia—kind-hearted and goofy, yet lonely from years in the public eye.

Music is like no other business. It's about being at the right place at the right time, following your nose and diving in feet first. It's about being plugged into the mystical electricity and about surfing on the wild energy. And no one captures this wild feral spirit better than Alan McGee whose helter-skelter career through music has made him a major force. His ability to start a raw power ruckus brought the visceral danger back to a moribund mid-eighties music scene.

Roger Scruton is a polymath. He has written authoritatively on a huge range of subjects from the environment to wine, from cosmology to the Middle East. He is also an accomplished musician (organ and piano) and a composer of works including an opera and a song cycle. This is Scruton’s second major work on music for Bloomsbury - the first being Understanding Music (Continuum, 2009).

Best-selling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past 50 years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song’s significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity.

As Bing Crosby once put it, the rise of Tiny Tim represents "one of the most phenomenal success stories in show business". In 1968, after years of playing dive bars and lesbian cabarets on the Greenwich Village scene, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce, the falsetto-voiced, ukulele-playing Tiny Tim landed a recording contract with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label and an appearance on NBC’s Laugh-In. The resulting album, God Bless Tiny Tim, and its single, "Tip-Toe Thru the Tulips with Me", catapulted him to the highest levels of fame.

This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself.

At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there the last when Mozart was seventeen, all vividly recounted here by acclaimed conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous than the prosperous north, and to Venice, the carnivelesque birthplace of public opera.

Olly Murs invites you behind the scenes in his official autobiography. "My life has been a non-stop roller-coaster of extreme emotions, crazy days, unexpected highs and yet my life hasn't been without its low points too. I've tried to imagine myself sitting down with you explaining what I was thinking and feeling during those times. I hope this book will give you a behind-the-scenes view of my journey into a place where I finally found what had been missing in my life for all those years: music."

John Corabi recounts his life from the mean streets of Philadelphia to the Sunset Strip. Take a look behind the scenes at Corabi’s time fronting Mötley Crüe, Union, and The Dead Daisies, as well as his time playing rhythm guitar with Ratt and even his stint as a long-haul trucker. Whether it’s detailing his parents' difficult divorce, his family’s dark history of abuse, his run-in with a serial killer, or simply the best way to arrive at a wedding—which maybe is by helicopter and maybe it isn’t—he pulls no punches and outlines the good and bad of it all in this raucous autobiography.

Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship.

18 and Life on Skid Row tells the story of a boy who spent his childhood moving from Freeport, Bahamas, to California and finally to Canada and who, at the age of eight, discovered the gift that would change his life. Throughout his career, Sebastian Bach has sold over 20 million records both as the lead singer of Skid Row and as a solo artist.

Originally published in 1978 as The Beach Boys and the California Myth, this groundbreaking study was both the first full-length book on the band and the first to recognize Brian Wilson as one of the most significant and influential artists of the twentieth century. Covering the turbulent family strife and internal conflicts as well as giving proper attention to the remarkable music, the book was an instant classic.

Sir Cliff Richard OBE is the biggest-selling artist of all time, selling over 250 million records around the world since he burst onto the music scene in 1958. But how has he kept his appeal all these years? In a world fuelled by drink, sex and drugs, he is perennially attractive without any of those things that keep other singers' profiles high. Now, working with the highly acclaimed biographer and journalist, Penny Junor, Cliff is going to talk freely and frankly about what it is like to be Cliff.

This is Jools and Jim's Joyride. Join Jools Holland and Jim Moir as each week they invite a special guest to put on their seatbelt and take to the road, as they chatter with friends about transport, travel, trips and tittle tattle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adele touches the hearts of millions of people who love her for her music and share the real and honest emotion she brings to each and every song. In Adele, best-selling biographer Sean Smith talks to those close to her as he follows her astonishing journey to fame that began on the gritty streets of Tottenham. Through compelling new research and interviews, he reveals that there is far more to Adele than the superstar we all think we know.

Over a period of forty-five years, Bill Frisell has established himself as one of the most innovative and influential musicians at work today. Growing up playing clarinet in orchestras and marching bands, Frisell has progressed through a remarkable range of musical personas—from devotee of jazz master Jim Hall to 'house guitarist' of estimable German label ECM, from edgy New York downtown experimentalist to plaintive country and bluegrass picker. He has been a pioneering bandleader and collaborator, a prolific composer and arranger, and a celebrated Grammy Award winner.

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his 70s, who wouldn't even deign to make a victory speech? In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition.

Explaining how Morrison sought to use his role as a rock singer to express the power of inner experience, Wyld shows how praxis was at the heart of Morrison’s approach, revealed in his journey through the arduous ordeals of shamanic initiation. He was a shaman, mystic, and sage—and an essential part of a great spiritual awakening to which he gave himself over fully.