This is the first comprehensive history of goth music and culture. John Robb explores the origins and legacy of this enduring scene, which has its roots in the post-punk era. Featuring sound and original music, and read by the author in his distinctive narrative style, this is a truly atmospheric audiobook that takes you right into the heart of the history of goth.

In the late '80s and early '90s, Steve Turner and his friends—Seattle skate punks, hardcore kids, and assorted misfits—started forming bands in each other’s basements and accidentally created a unique sound that spread far beyond their once-sleepy city. Mud Ride offers an inside look at the tight-knit grunge scene, the musical influences and experiments that shaped the grunge sound, and the story of Turner's bands, Green River and Mudhoney.

Jon Savage's oral history of Joy Division is the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on May 18, 1980. It weaves together interviews conducted by the author, but never used in the making of the film Joy Division, which told the story of the band in their own words, as well as those of their peers, collaborators, and contemporaries.

It has been three decades since Nirvana upended the pop cultural landscape with Nevermind, the landmark album that became the soundtrack of Generation X, capturing its confusion, frustration, and passion. In 1993, Michael Azerrad published what stands as the definitive biography of this revolutionary band and its star-crossed leader Kurt Cobain. Written with the band’s complete cooperation—the only book to feature interviews with Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl—it became a massive bestseller and, in the words of Cobain, "the best rock book I’ve ever read.”

Cured is not only the first insider account of the early days of the band, it is a revealing look at the artistic evolution of the enigmatic Robert Smith, the iconic lead singer, songwriter, and innovative guitarist at the heart of The Cure. A deeply rebellious, sensitive, tough, and often surprisingly "normal" young man, Smith was from the start destined for stardom, a fearless nonconformist and provocateur who soon found his own musical language through which to express his considerable and unique talent.

Scenic Wye Valley isn't the typical place for a rock story to begin, but when Echo & the Bunnymen hit the studio to record their ground-breaking debut album, Crocodiles, it was anything but ordinary. The album was the making of the band - cultivating a cult following which would soon evolve into staggering mainstream success. Their lives would never be the same again. In Echoes, legendary guitarist and founding member of Echo & the Bunnymen Will Sergeant recounts the band's whirlwind rise to stardom with his trademark wryness and intelligence.

Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, David Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

1967 explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive/compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen—just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes. When he arrives in January 1966 Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family’s loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967 he’s mutated into a 6'2 tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.

Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story - a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith's Just Kids.

After more than two decades of research and travels, Christophe Lebold, who befriended the poet and spent time with him in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art. Gracefully blending biography and essay, he interrogates the mission Cohen set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the flip side of light.

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. Authors Alain Silver and James Ursini tell the complete history of Double Indemnity in their latest and most provocative work on film noir: From the Moment They Met It Was Murder.

Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it in the wider '70s context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre's major themes - stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse - Reynolds tracks glam's legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from '80s art-pop icons to 21st-century idols of outrage.

In this first of a groundbreaking multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1: 1969-73 captures the life of Paul McCartney in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which McCartney recreated himself as both a man and a musician. Informed by hundreds of interviews, extensive ground up research, and thousands of never-before-seen documents THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1 is an in depth, revealing exploration of McCartney’s creative and personal lives beyond the Beatles.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.

On December 31, 2020, the world was shocked to learn about the death of hip-hop legend MF DOOM. Born in London and raised in the suburban enclave of Long Beach, New York, Daniel Dumile Jr.'s love of cartoons and comic books would soon turn him into one of hip-hop's most enigmatic, prolific, and influential figures. Sweeping and definitive, The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast recounts the rise, fall, redemption, and untimely demise of MF DOOM.

Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future—the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But it's also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other.

Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it in the wider '70s context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre's major themes - stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse - Reynolds tracks glam's legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from '80s art-pop icons to 21st-century idols of outrage.

This is the first comprehensive history of goth music and culture. John Robb explores the origins and legacy of this enduring scene, which has its roots in the post-punk era. Featuring sound and original music, and read by the author in his distinctive narrative style, this is a truly atmospheric audiobook that takes you right into the heart of the history of goth.

William and Jim Reid, brothers and founding members of The Jesus and Mary Chain—a band that bridged the gap between the punk explosion and the emergence of grunge and Britpop—chronicle the chaos, confusion, and stories behind their music.

Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music. He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit. But more than anything, he wanted to make music—to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire. His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo.

Beginning with Simon's remarkable childhood and exploring his relationship with his father, Ivor Raymonde (the legendary producer, musician and arranger for acts such as the Walker Brothers and songwriter for artists including Dusty Springfield), the book will journey through the musician's rise to prominence and his time with Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. It will also chart the successful career he has forged running his own label, Bella Union, for the past twenty-seven years, discovering and developing globally renowned artists.

Before he was responsible for some of the most iconic drumming in popular music, Stephen Morris grew up in 1960s and '70s industrial Macclesfield, on a quiet road that led seemingly to nowhere. Far removed from the bright lights and manic energy of nearby Manchester, he felt stifled by suburbia and feared he might never escape. Then he joined Joy Division - while they were still known as Warsaw - a pioneer of the rousing post-punk sound that would revolutionise 20th-century rock.

In the second half of the 20th century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war.

Joy Division changed the face of music. Godfathers of alternative rock, they reinvented music in the post-punk era, creating a new sound - dark, hypnotic, and intense - that would influence U2, Morrissey, R.E.M., Radiohead, and numerous others. The story is now legendary: In 1980, on the heels of their groundbreaking debut, Unknown Pleasures, and on the eve of their first U.S. tour, the band was rent asunder by the tragic death of their enigmatic lead singer, Ian Curtis.

Poised on the brink of success, the dizzying heights of the unknown lying ahead, Ian Curtis had taken his own life. Grieving yet determined, Stephen Morris emerged from the wreckage of Joy Division to the dawn of something new: a new band, a new tour, a new beginning. Under the name New Order, Morris and his bandmates set their sights on America, only to encounter new disasters. Yet, in true northern spirit, not even this sudden tragedy could dissuade them from following their haphazard path to greatness.

One of the few indisputable geniuses of pop music, Sly Stone is a trailblazer and a legend. He created a new kind of music, mixing Black and white, male and female, funk and rock. As a songwriter, he penned some of the most iconic anthems of the 1960s and ’70s, from “Everyday People” to “Family Affair.” As a performer, he electrified audiences with a persona and stage presence that set a lasting standard for pop-culture performance.

Debbie Harry defined iconic band Blondie’s look. Chris Stein—her performing partner, lover, and lifelong friend—was its architect and defined its sound. “Parallel Lines”, their third album, catapulted to #1, sold 20 million copies, and launched singles like “Heart of Glass”, "Hangin' On the Telephone," and “One Way or Another”, providing the beat when Bianca Jagger and Halston danced at Studio 54 and the soundtrack to every 1970’s punk-soundtracked romance.

Seasoned music writer Dan Ozzi chronicles this embattled era in punk. Focusing on eleven prominent bands who made the jump from indie to major, Sellout charts the twists and turns of the last “gold rush” of the music industry, where some groups “sold out” and rose to surprise super stardom, while others buckled under mounting pressures. Sellout is both a gripping history of the music industry’s evolution, and a punk rock lover’s guide to the chaotic darlings of the post-grunge era.

In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most.

Bestselling authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour tell the no-holds-barred history of the iconic music festival. Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the tour’s pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock’s rise–as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large.