Crossroads: In Search of the Moments that Changed Music

How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist…..

In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture. Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane […]

The Big Book of Rock & Roll Names tells the behind-the-scenes stories of how the world’s most popular and influential rock and pop acts got their names. By turns fascinating, funny, and bizarre, the pages offer insight into the peculiar choices and idiosyncratic psychologies of hundreds of top musicians from the 1960s to the present. Originally […]

Bob Stanley is a music writer and a founder member of Saint Etienne the three piece who emerged with the classic album Foxbase Alpha in 1991, and went on to become one of the best loved British groups of their generation. Here, he writes about the influences and impulses behind his own songwriting. Includes photographs by […]