Styles

The first full-length biography of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ beloved roadie, assistant, confidant and friend

A towering figure in horn-rimmed glasses, Malcolm ‘Mal’ Evans was an invaluable member of the Beatles’ inner circle. Serving as their long-time roadie, personal assistant and protector, he was a sometime lyricist, occasional performer and regular fixer at the height of the group’s fame and beyond.

But Mal’s dedication to his beloved ‘boys’ and his own desire for stardom took its toll, leading to the dissolution of his marriage and his untimely death in January 1976.

Until now, Mal’s extraordinary life has remained shrouded in mystery. Drawing on hundreds of exclusive interviews and with full access to Mal’s unpublished archives – including his personal diaries, manuscripts and memorabilia – renowned Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack paints the first complete portrait of this complicated figure at the heart of the Beatles’ story.

Living the Beatles Legend is a fascinating but ultimately tragic tale about life at the edges of superstardom.

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From traditional favourites to modern country dances, these 100 Favourite Ceilidh Dances are bound to get your blood pumping. The book includes easy to follow instructions and diagrams, a brief history of Scottish country dancing, and information about the origins of each dance.

Beginners will be expert country dancers in no time, and experts will return again and again to share and call their favourite dances.

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Using the arrival of the Spice Girls as a jumping-off point, this fascinating new narrative will explore, celebrate and contextualise the thus-far-uncharted period of British pop that flourished between 1996 and 2006. A double-denim-loving time before the glare of social media and the accession of streaming.

The bastions of ’00s pop – armed with buoyant, immaculately crafted, carefree anthems – provided entertainment, escapism and fun for millions. It was a heady, chorus-heavy decade – populated by the likes of Steps, S Club 7, Blue, 5ive, Mis-Teeq, Hear’Say, Busted, Girls Aloud, McFly, Craig David and Atomic Kitten, among countless others – yet the music was often dismissed as inauthentic, juvenile, not ‘worthy’ enough: ultimately, a ‘guilty pleasure’.

Now, music writer Michael Cragg aims to redress that balance. Using the oral-history format, Cragg goes beneath the surface of the bubblegum exterior, speaking to hundred’s of the key players about the reality of their experiences.

Compiled from interviews with popstars, songwriters, producers, choreographers, magazine editors, record-company executives, TV moguls and more, this is a complete behind-the-scenes history of the last great movement in British pop – a technicolour turning-point ripe for re-evaluation, documented here in astonishing, honest and eye-opening detail.

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Dance Music Manual, aimed at the novice and seasoned professional alike, takes the reader through the software and hardware needed to create original, captivating, and professional sounding music.

Key features of Dance Music Manual include:

• How to create compelling, professional-sounding original or remixed dance tracks.

• The differences between different genres and how to produce them.

• How to expose your tracks to their chosen audience and equip you with the skills to develop your career as a dance music producer and engineer.

Along with the book is a companion website, which provides examples of synthesis programming, compression, effects, MIDI files, and examples of the tracks discussed in this edition.

The new and improved fourth edition covers processes and techniques used by music producers, masters, mixers, and DJs. Each page is full of facts presented in a manner that is easy to absorb and implement.

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The second in this new series, The Virgin Book of Hit Singles is the most-up-to-date and comprehensive record of the music charts available today and a perfect, collectable complement to The Virgin Book of Hit Albums and The Virgin Book of Top 75 Charts.
Now improved and fine-tuned, and drawn from the Official Charts Company Data since 1952, The Virgin Book of Hit Singles features the most comprehensive, easy to read and accessible music chart data and information. It’s all here — expanded artist biographies, side notes of interest, label and catalogue numbers, peak positions, number of weeks on chart and weeks at number one. Also includes EP charts.
The Virgin Book of Hit Singles is essential reading, and reference, for any music lover.

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So here it is…

The perfect gift for music lovers of all ages, The Official Christmas No. 1 Singles Book is jam-packed with facts, figures and photos to get your toes tapping along to the sounds of seven decades of festive chart-toppers.

Have you ever wondered how many Christmas number ones actually have the word ‘Christmas’ in their title? Or how many TV talent-show winners have claimed the festive top spot?

Do you know which artist has racked up the most Christmas number ones? Or which single is the biggest-selling seasonal chart-topper of all time?

Can you name the only song to have topped the Christmas chart twice by two different artists? Or the only artist to have been Christmas number one twice with the same song?

The answers to all these questions – plus many more – can be found in this exclusive festive companion, published in conjunction with the Official Charts Company.

With a fully illustrated double-page spread for every year since the UK singles chart began in 1952, Michael Mulligan’s fun and authoritative journey through the Christmas archives will delight curious browsers and dedicated pop nerds alike. Featuring top-ten countdowns, fascinating trivia about the highest-charting Christmas singles and plenty of entertaining infographics, this is the ideal family stocking-filler, celebrating all that is wonderful, whimsical and unpredictable about the festive season’s most hotly contested musical event.

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London. Wham! Pop, glitz and glamour. And two girls with stars in their eyes.

Our friendship began one windy day in 1982, outside Finsbury Park tube. It was an instant like at first sight. We were on our way to a Wham! rehearsal. Pepsi was the new girl in the band and over a car stereo, a cassette tape and that journey to Bushey we bonded. We had no idea that we were on the first of many journeys together and that soon we’d be travelling all over Europe, Australia, America, China and Japan. Or that no matter where we went, together, we’d find a way to make every exotic destination feel like home.

We’d both been teenagers during the seventies – a dreary and difficult decade, especially if you were young in London and you didn’t have much money.

So, in 1982, anything was possible for us – a pair of twentysomethings who hadn’t been to university, who didn’t have any money, who dreamt of singing and dancing, but ultimately lived for fun. Everything felt new and life was a question mark. We had no idea what was lying ahead, but we wanted to say yes.

What we didn’t know was that we were saying yes to a lifetime of connection that has endured whatever we’ve done, wherever we’ve been. From the side of the stage to its centre – we have many stories to tell.

And it’s all here, it’s all in black and white.

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A fully memorized fretboard is one of the most underrated skills in the guitar world. It’s not expected from a beginner, nor is it taught in the normal course of guitar learning.

But the smartest and best guitarists in the world know why fretboard knowledge can be the secret to being good at guitar.

Why memorize the fretboard?

Apart from sounding extremely cool when you say “Oh, you played a C instead of a C#”, it amplifies every area of your guitar playing:

Area #1: Guitar scales won’t be just patterns on the neck:

Guitar scales are simply a couple notes repeated all over the fretboard. If you understand this simple concept and have the fretboard memorized, you won’t need to memorize those endless patterns all over the fretboard. Simply get set and solo!

Area #2: You’ll unlock 1000+ guitar chords:

Chords are combinations of specific notes too. You can hold these notes anywhere on the fretboard to get chords in different contexts. And if you know the chord formulas (which we teach in our other books) you just unlocked the gates to the world of harmony – without having to memorize them all!

But it starts with – you guessed it – fretboard knowledge.

Area #3: Song writing becomes child’s play:

Break free from common chord shapes and sounds to venture into the wild west of music writing. Add your own chords to popular songs, change the key or simply be more creative.

Granted this is an advanced skill, but the shortest path to get there – fretboard memorization!

Area #4: And the biggest benefit of them all – improvisation!

Improvising is natural to a person who knows the fretboard! New note combinations, unorthodox melodies, playing fluently with a backing track or even writing new melodies. Nothing works if you can’t pick out the notes on the fretboard in an instant.

So, fretboard knowledge allows you to solo better, improvise better, play better harmonies and write songs. That’s a major chunk of guitar right there!

Why more people don’t memorize the fretboard.

It’s hard! It seems impossible! It’ll come with time!

And we agree with all of that. Memorizing 24 frets across 6 strings is not the easiest thing in the world. And most guitarists only ever master it after 1000s of hours on the guitar.

But we want to give you a cheat code!

Inside this book, we’ve simplified this process that takes a “lifetime” into 5 easy steps. Using these, absolute beginners have memorized the fretboard in less than 24 hours. Some even in as little as 5 hours!

Wondering how we do it? Simple!

We combined pattern recognition with memory techniques and games to create a system that will show you patterns hidden in plain sight and give you short memory phrases like “Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie”. This will take the layout of the fretboard right to the brain – WITHOUT any sort of blunt memorization.

With over 700 5–star reviews, this book has helped over 39,000 guitarists shorten their learning time and gain the skill of the guitar gods – in under 24 hours!

And it costs less than a pack of strings!

So, scroll up and click ‘buy now’ to gain the unfair advantage of the pros in under 24 hours!

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A Rough Trade Book of the Year

The much-anticipated first book from Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler

With over 70 million records sold, heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath are one of the most influential bands of all time. From the very beginning, Geezer Butler was at the heart of their success. He named the group, provided the bass behind their distinctive sound and wrote the lyrics that resonated so powerfully with fans around the world.

At long last, Geezer is ready to tell his side of the Sabbath story, from early days as a scrappy blues quartet through to the many lineup changes, the record-breaking tours and the international hell-raising with Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward.

Featuring Geezer’s candid reflections on his working-class childhood in Luftwaffe-battered Birmingham, his almost-life as an accountant and his fascination with horror, religion and the occult, Into the Void reveals the softer side of the heavy metal legend, while holding nothing back.

Like Geezer’s bass lines and the story of Black Sabbath themselves, Into the Void is original, dramatic and one hell of a ride.

Geezer Butler’s book ‘Into the Void’ was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 05-06-2023.

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Everyone knows jazz is on the cutting edge of music, but how much do you know about its influence in the visual arts? With album covers that took inspiration from the avant-garde, jazz’s primarily African American musicians and their producers sought to challenge and inspire listeners both musically and visually.

Arranged chronologically, each chapter covers a key period in jazz history, from the earliest days of the twentieth century to today’s postmodern jazz. Chapters begin with substantive introductions and present the evolution of jazz imagery in all its forms, mirroring the shifting nature of the music itself. With two authoritative features per chapter and over 300 images, The Art of Jazz is a significant contribution to the literature of this intrepid art form.

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‘If there is anything new to be discovered about Bob Dylan, you can probably find it in The Bob Dylan Centre… Now the Bob Dylan Centre is publishing its first book, essentially the archive in miniature: Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine. It is a 608-page tome examining over 1000 images and objects culled from the collection by archivists and curators Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel.’ – The Telegraph

Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The documents, as essential as they are intriguing―draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera― comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just steps away from the archival home of Dylan’s early hero, Woody Guthrie.

Nearly all the materials preserved at The Bob Dylan Center are unique, previously unavailable, and, in many cases, even previously unknown. As the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center, BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is the first wide-angle look at the Dylan archive, a book that promises to be of vast interest to both the Nobel Laureate’s many musical fans as well as a broader cultural audience.

Edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE focuses a close look at the full scope of Dylan’s working life, particularly from the dynamic perspective of his ongoing and shifting creative processes―his earliest home recordings in the mid-1950s right up through Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), his most recent studio recording, and into the present day.

The centerpiece of BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is a carefully curated selection of over 600 images including never-before-circulated draft lyrics, writings, photographs, drawings and other ephemera from the Dylan archive.

With an introductory essay by Sean Wilentz and epilogue by Douglas Brinkley, the book features a surprising range of distinguished writers, artists and musicians, including Joy Harjo, Greil Marcus, Michael Ondaatje, Gregory Pardlo, Amanda Petrusich, Tom Piazza, Lee Ranaldo, Alex Ross, Ed Ruscha, Lucy Sante, Greg Tate and many others. After experiencing the collection firsthand in Tulsa, each of the authors was asked to select a single item that beguiled or inspired them. The resulting essays, written specifically for this volume, shed new light on not only Dylan’s creative process, but also their own.

BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is the magnum opus every Bob Dylan fan has been waiting for since the 60s and will be a landmark publication for the ages.

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“Collecting vinyl is an addiction. Nothing beats listening to vinyl and pouring over the cover art and inner sleeve. The first album that I ever bought was Led Zeppelin II when I was 13. I have at least 40 different versions of it now.” — Ross Halfin 

Led Zeppelin released only eight studio albums and no singles over the course of their 12-year career, but to date there are more than 1,000 official singles and 2,000 LPs in the market. 

This definitive volume illustrates in full colour some of the rarest and most interesting vinyl releases, including one-of-a-kind rarities, bizarre regional variations, official albums and bootleg recordings of legendary concerts, sometimes featuring handmade artwork or colored vinyl. All the vinyl, labels and covers have been documented by photographer Ross Halfin in superb detail, and are annotated with details of their release. 

In addition, the book includes over forty pages of the most up-to-date comprehensive discography ever compiled on the band, with forensic detail. All known album and single vinyl releases from around the world are listed with catalogue numbers, release or recording dates and additional notes. 

A labour of love, Led Zeppelin Vinyl is a must-have for fans of the group and vinyl enthusiasts. It is a paean of praise to vinyl artwork and graphic design: the illustrations are explosive and surreal, playful, experimental and subversive, interpreting multiple artistic disciplines with flair and wit.

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Celebrate 40 years of WHAM! with the Sunday Times bestseller from one half of the world’s most famous bands

‘I couldn’t put it down. Such a fantastic book’ Chris Evans, Virgin Radio
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School mates. Band mates. Soul mates . . .

When Andrew Ridgley took George Michael, the new boy at school, under his wing, he discovered a soul mate.

In Wham! George and Me, Andrew tells the story of how they rode a rollercoaster of success around the world while making iconic records and surviving superstardom with their friendship intact. It is a memoir of love, music, the flamboyant 1980s and living in a pop hurricane.

No one else can ever tell their story – because no one else was there . . .

Forty years on from their explosion into pop music, Andrew Ridgeley tells the inside story of Wham!, his life-long friendship with George Michael and the formation of a band that changed music.
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‘A joyous celebration of the Wham! years. For anyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, it will take you on a nostalgia trip. It’s an honest but affectionate account of a remarkable duo who remained true to their origins and their friendship throughout it all’ Daily Express

‘As infectious as their music’ Daily Mirror

‘A remarkably generous memoir. In more than one sense, the biography of a friend’ Spectator

‘A great story’ Saturday Live, Radio 4

‘A lovely book. A love letter to George’ Graham Norton, BBC One

‘Charming, heartfelt . . . there’s a real poignancy to Ridgeley’s description of Wham!’s glory days’ Sunday Times

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Record covers are a sign of our life and times. Like the music on the discs, they address such issues as love, life, death, fashion, and rebellion. For music fans the covers are the expression of a period, of a particular time in their lives. Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for―Andy Warhol’s covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. This edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best rock album covers of the 60s to 90s from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and former record-publicity executive Michael Ochs’s enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an underappreciated art form.

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