When it comes to earthshaking songs—the ones that signal a tectonic shift in the current musical landscape—there is “Johnny B. Goode” . . . there is “Good Vibrations” . . . and there is "I Feel Love." A disco touchstone recorded by Donna Summer in 1976 and released on her fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday, in 1977, "I Feel Love" is one of the most important records in music history, and one of the most influential."I Feel Love" topped charts the world over—including in the U...

Dave Thompson, author of Virgin's acclaimed Red Hot Chili Peppers biography, takes a new and very detailed look at the creation of one of the world's most influential bands. After all the streets of London had been covered in 'Clapton Is God' tributes, the three top rock instrumentalists of their time, all stars in their own right, came together to form Cream. Cream went on to become the first band to break openthe lucrative US market by dint of their live shows alone.Updat...

Offering a unique analysis and discussion of her life, career, and work, this is the true story of Patti Smith. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant American artists of the rock age, an acclaimed poet, and a figurehead for many liberal political causes, Patti Smith went from an ugly-duckling childhood in postwar New Jersey to become queen of the 1970s New York art scene. Not a tell-all biography, this measured, accurate, and enthusiastic account of Smith's career is written f...

The first ever biography of one of the most remarkable bands in rock history. Since the moment they emerged into the mainstream in 1974, armed with the hit ""This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us"", The Sparks - brothers Ron and Russell Mael - have endeared themselves to successive generations of fans, not only with their wry humour and quirkiness, but also with a lyrical and musical inventiveness that sees them listed among the most influential acts ever. Originally published to celeb...

First-ever look at the intertwining, outrageous lives of three rock legends.When Lou Reed and Iggy Pop first met David Bowie in the fall of 1971, Bowie was just another English musician passing through New York City. Lou was still recovering from the collapse of the Velvet Underground, and Iggy had already been branded a loser... Yet within two years they completely changed the face of popular music with a decadent glamour and street-level vibe. With Bowie producing, Reed's Tra...

London's Burning is the story of punk rock as it happened, stripped of hindsight and future legend, and laid bare. Here are the Damned and the Adverts on tour, the Sex Pistols swearing through their prime-time television debut, the Tom Robinson Band conducting a club full of skinheads through the anthem "Glad to Be Gay," rioting Rastas running through the carnage that closed the Notting Hill Carnival, Sid Vicious arguing about which was David Bowie's best song. At the same time, i...

Soccer FAQ is a fast, furious, and opinionated guide to the world's most popular game, an all-encompassing history that introduces readers to the biggest clubs, the greatest games, the finest players, and the fiercest rivalries. From Sunderland to Seattle, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, Soccer FAQ delves into every aspect of the sport, tracing its development from a victorious Anglo-Saxon army kicking the heads of their fallen enemies around a field, to the multibillion-dol...

By 1987, David Bowie was at a creative, critical, and commercial low. His most recent album was dismissed by the music press, his latest tour written off as a disaster. Fifteen years after becoming the most colourfully controversial superstar in recent rock history, Bowie was seen as a spent force.Almost twenty years later, Bowie has re-established himself at the very peak of his profession in one of the most extraordinary comebacks in rock history. His 1995 release of the critical...

This ebook is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. Bloomsbury Academic publish acclaimed resources for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as the general reader, across a broad range of subjects including Archaeology, Art & Visual Culture, Biblical Studies, Business & Management, Drama & Performance Studies, Economics, Education, Film & Media, History, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Music & Sound Studies, Philosophy, Politics & International Relations, Psychology, Religious ...

Sherlock Holmes FAQ is a one-stop guide to more than a century's worth of mystery, mayhem, and most of all, deduction. Dave Thompson digs deep inside the manifold worlds of Sherlock Holmes, offering a dramatic and detailed digest of the Baker Street sleuth in all of his many guises, as TV and radio star, movie phenomenon, and, of course, literary giant.

The Twilight Zone is among the most beloved shows in American television history, a pioneering fantasy behemoth that bridged the cultural gap between the 1950s and 1960s with thought-provoking mystery, mind-boggling theorems, and occasionally outright horror.The Twilight Zone FAQ takes the reader back to that halcyon era, looking back on the show and its impact as a force for societal change, via reflections on the manifold topics and controversies that the show t...

The Child Ballads are a series of over 300 traditional ballads from England and Scotland that, along with their American variants, were anthologized by folklorist Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. An Evolving Tradition is the story of the Child Ballads—the world’s best-known and most highly regarded repository of traditional English folk songs, and the wellspring for approximately 10,000 recordings over the last century, from obscure musicological archives to classic releases ...