With greatly expanded text, this is the most revealing and frank personal 30-year chronicle of the group ever written. Insider Barry Miles covers the Beatles story from childhood to the break-up of the group.

London has long been a magnet for aspiring artists and writers, musicians and fashion designers seeking inspiration and success. In London Calling, Barry Miles explores the counter-culture - creative, avant garde, permissive, anarchic - that sprang up in this great city in the decades following the Second World War. Here are the heady post-war days when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazz bars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Baco...

With the resurgence of vinyl going from strength to strength, album cover art is as important as it's ever been. This sumptuous book brings together 250 of the greatest album covers of all time and is arranged chronologically, beginning in 1956. Our judging panel, drawn from the great and the good of the music industry, has selected the final 275 entries, giving their reasons for selection to accompany the illustrations. From rock ‘n’ roll to pop, R&B to jazz, blues and even folk, some of ...

The Early Years is the authentic and compelling story of Pink Floyd, the group that gave alternative London its first real soundtrack and launched on the rock world a radical combination of music, light shows and pyrotechnic stage effects.Author Barry Miles saw the band play when they were still called The Pink Floyd Sound and he wrote the first ever article about them for a New York underground newspaper in 1966. He knew band members socially, witnessed the rapid ...

Barry Miles knew Frank Zappa intimately and was present at the recording of some of his most important albums. This sparkling biography brings the Zappa the musician and composer, Zappa the controversialist and Zappa the family man (despite his love of groupies, he was married for more than 30 years) together for the first time.Barry Miles' biography follows Zappa from his sickly Italian-American childhood in the 1940s (when his father, Frank senior, worked for the US military and w...

Authoritative biography of cult writer and author of NAKED LUNCH, William Burroughs (1914-1997).It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has writte...

The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period—from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963—it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles—acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them—vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores i...

Detective Sergeant Carmoody has gotten complaints about a peeping tom from a woman named Miss Morgan. Carmoody put her beachfront motel under surveillance, but while he was taking a meal break, someone broke into the motel, and murdered her.

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century.Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions...

'Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence'Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life, Los Angeles. His heroes were the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and the hookers, his beat the racetracks and strip joints and his inspiration a series of dead-end jobs in warehouses, offices and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer and begin to type...Brought up by a vio...

The Early Years is the authentic and compelling story of Pink Floyd, the group that gave alternative London its first real soundtrack and launched on the rock world a radical combination of music, light shows and pyrotechnic stage effects.Author Barry Miles saw the band play when they were still called The Pink Floyd Sound and he wrote the first ever article about them for a New York underground newspaper in 1966. He knew band members socially, witnessed the rapid ...

Beginning with the Weathermen explosion in Greenwich Village and ending with punk, the seventies was the age of extremes; sex, drugs and, of course, rock 'n' roll.With an extraordinary cast of characters, and even more extraordinary anecdotes, In The Seventies tells, firsthand, the story - and stories - of the decade. From Allen Ginsberg's hippie commune in upstate New York to the time Miles spent cataloguing William Burroughs' archives in London, from David Bowie in drag ...