Rockers! celebrates the biker style with panache and wit, showing how a love affair between bikes and speed became the original touchstone of a youth cult which continues to fascinate and endure, with its myths, magic and melancholy. In essence, and although they did not know it, rockers – with their raw edginess, studied cool and search for excitement, sex and violence – were icons. Rockers! achieves that rare marriage of immediacy and knowledge, through research and first-hand experience...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Music legend Rod Stewart takes us on a rollicking journey through his extraordinary life and career in this “action-packed memoir . . . full of bad behavior and enough ex-wives to fill an entire soccer side” (Rolling Stone).“Funny, self-deprecating, and a whole lot less boastful than he could be, Mr. Stewart offers a string of Grade-A rock ’n’ roll debauchery stories and . . . makes them charming.”—The New Y...

The first hilarious volume of comedy writer, journalist, radio DJ and screenwriter Danny Baker's memoir, and now the inspiration for the major BBC series CRADLE TO GRAVE, starring Peter Kay.'And what was our life like in this noisy, dangerous and polluted industrial pock-mark wedged into one of the capital's toughest neighbourhoods? It was, of course, utterly magnificent and I'd give anything to climb inside it again for just one day.'...

The dazzlingly funny second volume of Danny Baker's memoirs: the television years.Since my first book was published I have had countless friends and family members get in touch to say how come I hadn't included this story or that tale. Was I ashamed of being shot twice, once up the arse, in Jamaica Road? How long should a man live with such a secret? If by retrospectively dropping my trousers every few pages I can reveal a fuller picture of myself during these year...

I was only sixteen when I bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year later, I formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls and played gigs, and signed to an indie label, and started releasing records.Then, for eighteen years, between 1982 and 2000, I was one half of the group Everything But the Girl. In that time, we released nine albums and sold nine million records. We went on countless tours, had hit singles and flop singles, were reviewed and interviewed to within a...

“Spend the day in bed” with Autobiography by Morrissey, whose new album Low in High School is out November 17thSteven Patrick Morrissey was born in Manchester on May 22nd 1959. Singer-songwriter and co-founder of the Smiths (1982–1987), Morrissey has been a solo artist for twenty-six years, during which time he has had three number 1 albums in England in three different decades.Achieving eleven Top 10 albums (plus nine with the Smiths), hi...

In this book my father dies. I almost die.*** My showbiz career winds down. And yet everyone keeps telling me it's the funniest book I've ever written. If I'd known that's what the public wanted, I'd have cancelled Pets Win Prizes and just got sick sooner.Along the way this time we encounter, among others, David Bowie, Kanye West (I think), John Cleese, Peter O'Toole, and have several adventures in the Fourth Dimension. Oh, and I can reveal the Man With The Foulest Mou...

This eclectic, funny, and moving book tracks a life lived in music and words. Paul Quarrington ruminates on the bands of his childhood; his restless youth, spent playing bass with the cult band Joe Hall and the Continental Drift; and his incarnation, in middle age, as rhythm guitarist and singer with the band Porkbelly Futures.Ranging through rock ’n’ roll, the blues, folk, country and soul, he explores how songs are made, how they work, and why they affect us so d...

A charming, honest, funny, sad, tender and beautiful literary memoir, from Tim Rogers of You Am I. Think Patti Smith meet Dylan Thomas, by way of Banjo Paterson.'Rogers is a beautiful writer, both literate and lyrical ... Detours makes most rock memoirs look like How to Hypnotise Chooks. A heartbreaking work of staggering honesty.' West Australian'Of all the utterances delivered to me by strangers, my least favourite after "We can no l...

In 1982, aged twenty-three, Simon Parkes paid £1 for a virtually derelict building in Brixton. Over the next fifteen years he turned it into Britain's most iconic music venue. And now he's telling his story: full of fond - and wild - reminiscences of the famous musicians who played at the venue, including Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Lou Reed, The Ramones, New Order, the Beastie Boys and The Smiths.This is about one man's burning desire for success against the odds, his passion for...

"Part memoir, part discourse on the art of music. . . . This is an intelligent, thoughtful look into the mind of an artist."-- New York Times Book ReviewSince the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in h...

Skinheads, Mods, Teddy Boys, Hell's Angels, Punks, Glory Boys to name just a few ... this fascinating book is the definitive guide to hooligan history in the UK. It examines who the men behind the cults were, what made them tick and why they fought their battles.These warring youth factions inspired copycat cultures around the globe. This in-depth book cuts through the myths that Fleet Street built up around the cults; it tells the truth about the young, angry Britain of the 1970s that ins...