Showing titles in History & Criticism

It's 1963. The year of the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the rise of teenage consumerism and sexual emancipation, and Kennedy's assassination...and the birth of Beatlemania. In the beginning, The Beatles were a band of brothers who really did make Britain twist and shout. This is the unprecedented story of the Beatles' remarkable journey from Liverpool dance hall favourites to becoming the biggest band in the world in the space of just twelve rollercoaster months.

In Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, Charles R. Cross, author of the New York Times bestselling Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, examines the legacy of the Nirvana front man and takes on the question: why does Kurt Cobain still matter so much, 20 years after his death?...

Through a series of interviews with a wide range of people connected to Pink Floyd in their earliest days (including Nick Mason, Peter Jenner, Jenny Fabian, Storm Thorgerson, Duggie Fields and Peter Whitehead), John Cavanagh paints a vivid picture of how this remarkable debut album was created. He brings to life the stories behind each track, as well as Pink Floyd's groundbreaking live performances of the time.

An Almost Famous–like memoir for the twenty-first century: Pitchfork’s founder opens up about running the most influential, and infamous, music publication of the internet age. In 1996, as legacy media slowly went digital, a nineteen-year-old Minneapolitan named Ryan Schreiber fired up his...

In this audio-original production, author Richard Fawkes traces the development of the musical, highlighting composers and lyricists including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim. Presented by the vivacious singer Kim Criswell, star of Cats, and including nearly 100 famous musical extracts.

“A biography that crackles with as much energy as the great bluesman’s songs.” —Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the...

The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.

Grammy winner John JR Robinson's bestselling memoir, "King of the Groove - How One Dream Transformed into 60 Years of Making Legendary Music," is captivating listeners with behind-the-scenes stories from his unprecedented six-decade career. This book plays a part in helping others to find new ways to believe in themselves. The memoir, featuring a foreword by the late, Quincy Jones offers listener and listeners an intimate glimpse into Robinson's journey from small-town Creston, Iowa into a legacy of over 500 million records sold, proving that rhythm isn't just what he does—it's who he is.

Bloomsbury presents Unfinished by Lucas Cantor Santiago, read by Christopher Ragland. For most of his career, the Emmy Award–winning composer and producer Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery.

20th Century Ambient details a crucial period in which ambient music became a fully realized idea and is secretly one of the most popular genres in the world. This book walks through ambient's ambiguous timeline to uncover not just the genre's evolution but to understand why it resonates so deeply with the human spirit.

Over three decades and more than 150 million albums, AC/DC has established itself as much more than just a great rock band. For millions of fans spanning several generations across the world, they are an ear-bleedingly loud, sweat-soaked religion, courtesy of such classic albums as Highway to Hell and Back in Black. Now, in a book of astonishing breadth and scope, comes, for the very first time, the complete story of AC/DC.

Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the '70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous - and found it in classical music.

The result of a lifetime's passion for gig-going by one of British television's most respected writers, Foreground Music is at once enthusiastically detailed and tremendously illuminating - of both the concert moment and its place in popular culture. It is an engaging memoir of a life lived to the fullest, and a vivid, insightful, and humorous exploration of what music writing might be. Foreground Music captures the energy and power of life-changing gigs, while tracing the evolution of 40 years of musical movements and subcultures.

The 20th century witnessed an explosion of creativity as artists, musicians, and writers rejected centuries of past practice and boldly created new visual forms, new musical languages, and new ways of thinking. This is the story of the individuals who created the art, told within the context of the times in which they lived.

’You never knew what you were going to be confronted with when you went on Later…’ Nick Cave ‘Later… is a voyage of discovery for us as well as the viewers’ Dave Grohl Dave Grohl and Alicia Keys loved it, Björk treasured it, Ed Sheeran’s life was changed by it, Kano felt at home...

Do you want to know more about the fascinating history of Broadway musicals, the stars of yesterday and today, and what goes on behind the curtain of a musical production? In Musical Theatre For Dummies, Broadway insider Seth Rudetsky takes you backstage and reveals everything you want to know about life in the theatre.

In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy - the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age 32 from the effects of an eating disorder.

Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history. Krautrock explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its influences and innovations, its more mainstream acts (like Faust, Kraftwerk, and Can) as well as the less universally known (including Harmonia, Popol Vuh, Embryo, and Ash Ra Tempel), and how the genre developed in post-war Germany and what it means to today's listeners.

An intimate portrait of Handel’s life and inner circle, modeled after one of the composer’s favorite forms: the fugue. During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself - known to most as the composer of Messiah - is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives.

Journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom travels the country to paint a compelling portrait of the dawn, boom and subsequent blossoming of UK rap and grime. Taking us from the heart of south London to the West Midlands and South Wales, he explores how a history of migration and an enduring spirit of resistance have shaped the current realities of these linked communities and the music they produce. These sounds have become vessels for the marginalised, carrying Black and working-class stories into the light.