In his brief life, Hank Williams created one of the defining bodies of American music. Songs such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Hey, Good Lookin'," and "Jambalaya" sold millions of records and became the model for virtually all country music that followed. But by the time of his death at age twenty-nine, Williams had drunk and drugged and philandered his way through two messy marriages and out of his headline spot on the Grand Ole Opry. Even though he was country music's top seller, toward the end he was so famously unreliable that he was lucky to get a booking in a beer hall. Colin Escott's enthralling, definitive biograph -- now the basis of the major motion picture I Saw the Light -- vividly details the singer's stunning rise and his spectacular decline, revealing much that was previously unknown or hidden about the life of this country music legend. Originally published as Hank William: The Biography.

    Understanding the unique talents and training of musicians, veteran music career counselor Angela Myles Beeching presents a wealth of creative solutions for career advancement in the highly competitive music industry. Step-by-step instructions detail how to design promotional materials, book performances, network and access resources and assistance, jump start a stalled career, and expand your employment opportunities while remaining true to your music. Beeching untangles artist management and the recording industry, explains how to find and create performance opportunities, and provides guidance on grant writing and fundraising, day jobs, freelancing, and how to manage money, time, and stress. The companion website puts numerous up-to-date and useful internet resources at your fingertips. This essential handbook goes beyond the usual how-to, helping musicians tackle the core questions about career goals, and create a meaningful life as a professional musician. Beyond Talent is the ideal companion for students and professionals, emerging musicians and mid-career artists.

    Each insightful entry contains pungent critical analysis, biographical information and a complete album disography.Selected praise for "The Trouser Press Record Guide to '90's Rock""My trustworthy fact checker, be-all-and-end-all arguement settler and the last word on modern rock. I don't go on the air without it." -- Gary Cee, WLIR-FM"Still the most comprehensive guide through the labryrinth of indie and alternative rock. WHen you need a refresher course on all of Steve Albini's bands, or if you just wan tto know what Boy George did after Cultrue Club, this is the book to grab." -- David Browne, "Entertainment Weekly"

    More than that, this is a story about the enduring friendship among the book's three central voices: Theo Kogan, Sydney Silver, and Gina Volpe. They formed the Lunachicks at LaGuardia High School (of "Fame" fame) in the late '80s and had a record deal with Blast First Records as teenagers, whisked into the studio by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore.Over the course of thirteen-ish years, the Lunachicks brought their brand of outrageous hard-rockin' rebelliousness around the world countless times, simultaneously scaring conservative onlookers and rescuing the souls of wayward freaks, queers, and outcasts.Their unforgettable costume-critiques of pop culture were as loud as their "Marsha[ll]" amps, their ferocious tenacity as lasting as their pre-internet mythology. They toured with bands like the Go-Go's, Marilyn Manson, No Doubt, Rancid, and The Offspring; played the Reading Festival with Nirvana; and rocked the main stage at the Warped tour twice.Yet beneath all the makeup, wigs, and hilarious outfits were three women struggling to grow into adulthood under the most unorthodox of conditions. Together onstage they were invincible B-movie superheroes who kicked heaps of ass—but apart, not so much. Depression, addiction, and identity crises loomed overhead, not to mention the barrage of sexist nonsense they faced from the music industry.Filled with never-before-seen photos, illustrations, and ephemera from the band's private archive, and featuring contributions from Lunachicks drummer Chip English, founding member Sindi B., and former bandmate Becky Wreck, Fallopian Rhapsody is a bawdy, gripping, warts-and-all account of how these city kids relied on their cosmic creative connection to overcome internal strife and external killjoys, all the while empowering legions of fans to shoot for the moon.For readers of Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, and Chrissie Hynde's Reckless, Fallopian Rhapsody is the literary equivalent of diving headfirst into a moshpit and slowly but surely venturing up to the front of the stage.

    The play was an original commission by Radio 2 to mark the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd s album, and broadcast on 26 August 2013. Produced in collaboration with Sir Tom Stoppard s publishers Faber and Faber, the luxury package resembles a hard-backed book, including a CD carrying the 54-minute play, which includes the majority of The Dark Side of the Moon album, plus a 56-page bound insert of the play s script. "Darkside" is an abstract and compelling drama which follows Emily, a philosophy student, through a series of thought experiments, which are vividly brought to life. The play also ranges over a series of grand themes, which are both thought provoking and laced with Stoppard s characteristic wit and humour. The cast is impressive, with Bill Nighy as Dr Antrobus/the Witch Finder, Rufus Sewell is Mr Baggott/Ethics Man, Adrian Scarborough is Fat Man and Emily is Amaka Okafor.

    By turns hilarious, cautionary, poignant and powerful, the Stop Me...stories collected here include encounters with some of rock's most iconic stars, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Smiths, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam. From backstage brawls and drug blow-outs, to riots, superstar punch-ups, hotel room confessionals and tour bus lunacy, these are stories from the madness of a music scene now long gone. Allan Jones is an award-winning British music journalist and editor. In 1974, he applied for a job on the UK's best-selling music paper as a junior reporter, signing off his application with "Melody Maker needs a bullet up the arse. I'm the gun, pull the trigger†?. He was editor of Melody Maker from 1984 to 1997 and until 2014 editor of music and film monthly Uncut.

    It's about their adventures in pizza. It's about them discovering the DIY punk community and starting a record label. It's about a lot of other stuff too."

    In the spring of 1991 they decided to grapple with the beast, taking a theatrical tour that would exaggerate their differences. By turns enraptured by and disdainful of America and its obsession with celebrity they brushed shoulders with the famous (Axl Rose, Liza Minelli and Joni Mitchell) travelled, played and uttered their detached commentary on what was happening. Throughout they were shadowed by the author Chris Heath and photographer Pennie Smith.

    Only recently has science sought in earnest to understand and explain this impact. One remarkable recent study, analyzing the cries of newborns, shows that infants' cries contain common musical intervals, and children tease each other in specific, singsong ways no matter where in the world they live. Physics experiments show that sound waves can physically change the structure of a material; musician and world-famous conductor Daniel Barenboim believes musical sound vibrations physically penetrate our bodies, shifting molecules as they do. The Power of Music follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians to the crossroads of science and culture, to discover: how much of our musicality is learned and how much is innate? Can examining the biological foundations of music help scientists unravel the intricate web of human cognition and brain function? Why is music virtually universal across cultures and time-does it provide some evolutionary advantage? Can music make people healthier? Might music contain organizing principles of harmonic vibration that underlie the cosmos itself?

    This work tells the story of this one-off guitarist who came to prominence through the debauchery and stellar chart success of the American west coast's Guns N' Roses. Full description

    His greatest hits were sung tearfully in pubs up and down Britain, garlands of flowers were left at the Aladdin Sane mural in his old stomping ground of Brixton and tributes poured in from a galaxy of stars. To many of us, Bowie was so much more than a pop idol. But why?In Why Bowie Matters, Professor Will Brooker answers that question persuasively, as both a fan and an academic. A Bowie obsessive since childhood, he hit the headlines over the course of a year-long immersive research project that took him from London to Berlin and New York, following in Bowie’s footsteps, only listening to music and reading books he loved, and even at times adopting his fashion.In this original and illuminating book, Professor Brooker approaches Bowie from various angles, re-tracing his childhood on the streets of Bromley, taking us through his record collection and bookshelves, and deciphering the symbols and codes of his final work, Blackstar to piece together how an ordinary suburban teenager turned himself into a legend, and how perhaps we too could be a little more Bowie.He shows us that while David Robert Jones died on that terrible day in January, David Bowie will live on forever.

    in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire--the album sold well, but not spectacularly [and was] ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; 13 tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio broadcast, without a DJ, with cool, anglocentric commercials to boot. In the 36 years since its release, Sell Out, though still not the best selling release in The Who's catalog, has been embraced by a growing number of fans who regard it as the band's best work, one of the few recordings of the late 1960s that best represents the ambitious aesthetic possibilities of the concept album without becoming mired in a bog of smug, self-aggrandizing, high art aspirations. Sell Out, powerfully and ecstatically, articulates the nexus of pop music and pop culture.As much as it is an expression of the band's expanding sonic palette, Sell Out also functions as a critique of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not the cliched mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll but in the ways that commercial advertising fabricates a youth-oriented cultural reality by hawking pimple cream, deodorant, food, musical equipment, etc., and linking it with rock and roll. In this sense Sell Out is a reflective work, one that struggles with rock and roll as a cultural expression that aspires to aesthetic permanence while marketed as ephemera. From this conflict emerges a pop art masterpiece.

    At the age of 15, in 1964, Lulu - born Marie Lawrie in Glasgow - was already a star with her international hit song 'Shout'. At 18 she stole hearts as an English schoolgirl to Sidney Poitier's teacher with the movie hit 'To Sir With Love'. At 21, she married a Bee Gee, Maurice Gibb, and tied as winner of the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Boom-Bang-a-Bang'. Yet in 1993 she reached No.1 with 'Relight My Fire' (with Take That). Nearly forty years at the top of the showbiz tree, Lulu has never been afraid to experiment with new trends, and her book reflects the daring that took a girl from a Glasgow tenement to international stardom - as 'To Sir With Love' says, 'from crayons to perfume'.I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT (the title of a song Lulu wrote and Tina Turner recorded) is the devastatingly candid autobiography of a singer who has never shirked from facing anything.

    The book contains the lyrics, melody, and chord symbols for eight hit songs. The CD contains demos for listening and separate backing tracks so you can sing along. The CD is playable on any CD, but it is also enhanced for PC and Mac computer users so you can adjust the recording to any pitch without changing the tempo Perfect for home rehearsal, parties, auditions, corporate events, and gigs without a backup band. This volume includes 8 top hits from the show "Hannah Montana" The Best of Both Worlds * I Got Nerve * If We Were a Movie * Life's What You Make It * Nobody's Perfect * The Other Side of Me * We Got the Party * Who Said.

    His heart damaged by rheumatic fever as a youth, Berns was not expected to live to see 21. Although his name is little remembered today, Berns worked alongside all the greats of the era—Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, anyone who was anyone in New York rhythm and blues. In seven quick years, he went from nobody to the top of the pops—producer of monumental r&b classics, songwriter of “Twist and Shout,” “My Girl Sloopy,” “Piece of My Heart,” and others.His fury to succeed led Berns to use his Mafia associations to muscle Atlantic Records out of their partnership and intimidate new talents like Neil Diamond and Van Morrison, whom he had signed to his record label. Berns died at age 38 from a long-expected heart attack, just when he was seeing his grandest plans and life’s ambitions frustrated and foiled.