Dark Side‘s 50th birthday party continues, Tupac goes to the joint, Taylor and Bon are back in the bio spotlight, R.E.M. and Spirit‘s catalogues are ready for browsing — and there’s plenty more where they came from. Read all about ’em:
Pink Floyd: The Dark Side Of The Moon
By Storm Thorgerson & Aubrey Powell
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “March 2023 marks 50 years since the release of Pink Floyd’s classic album The Dark Side Of The Moon. Designed by Pentagram to high specifications, this celebratory publication brims with rare and unseen photographs and reveals the visual conception of the original iconic album artwork. It will be a covetable package for the legions of Floyd fans out there—new and old. This book presents rare and unseen backstage and onstage photography of the band during the album tours of 1972 to 1975. It has 129 candid photographs by Storm Thorgerson, Jill Furmanovsky, Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson that document the soundchecks, the shows, and the aftershows. It also includes a review of the October 1972 Wembley gig that provides insight into one of the Floyd’s most celebrated performances. The book also reveals the visual conception of the iconic album artwork and includes a complete listing of the tour dates.”
Highway to Hell: Updated Edition
By Clinton Walker
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Clinton Walker‘s biography of Bon Scott is the definitive account of the life of the iconic rocker, tracing his musical apprenticeship in bubblegum pop band The Valentines and blues-rockers Fraternity through to joining up with Angus and Malcolm Young in AC/DC, where his racy lyrics, unique vocal style and sheer charisma helped define a new, highly influential brand of rock ’n’ roll. Drawing on many first-person interviews and featuring a gallery of rare images, Walker traces AC/DC’s career through the life of their original frontman, from the Scottish roots he shared with the Youngs to small-time gigs to recording studios and international success, right up to Scott’s shocking death in 1980, just as the band were getting the worldwide recognition they’d worked for so tirelessly. Wild speculation about how Scott died has surfaced periodically in the intervening years and flared up again recently. For this edition, Walker re-examines the evidence surrounding Scott’s death, investigates these recurring claims, and concludes that such conspiracy theories have no basis in fact. The result underlines Highway to Hell’s status as the authoritative version of the life ― and untimely death ― of one of rock’s greatest characters.”
2Pac Behind Bars
By Michael Christopher
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On March 8, 1995, Tupac Shakur, arguably the world’s greatest rapper, arrived at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., secured in shackles. Tupac walked through the same hardened steel gates of that men such as “Lucky” Luciano and John Gotti had passed through before him. Little has been written or said about Shakur’s time inside one of America’s most notorious prisons, where he was incarcerated for seven months until being released on bail. Tupac Behind Bars is a glimpse inside the 2017 Rock And Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s tumultuous time in Dannemora. It marked an important period in his life, one during which he got married, met his self-professed biological father, and signed a deal with Death Row Records on a handwritten contract. The author, Michael Christopher, was a career corrections officer in New York State who reached the rank of lieutenant before his retirement after almost 27 years of service. During the course of his duties, he had contact with tens of thousands of prisoners, including infamous inmates like David Berkowitz (The Son of Sam) and Robert Chambers (The Preppy Killer), but after more than three decades, the one that left him with a positive memory is Shakur. Tupac Behind Bars is gfficer Christopher’s account of his personal encounters with the famous rapper.”
Taylor Swift: Stolen Lullabies
By Michael Francis Taylor
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Life isn’t a bout how to survive the storm, it’s about how to dance in the rain.” This is the definitive story of Taylor Swift and her incredible rise to success — from being a small-town girl with a dream to becoming one of the most influential and successful artists of her generation. Ever since she was 14 years old, Swift has never known any other world than show business, and we follow her journey through the good times and the times not so good, none more heartbreaking than losing the rights to her own music — her “stolen lullabies.” In her own words — and those who have played major parts in her career — we look back at how she turned failures into unbelievable success and chart the creation of a wonderful legacy by one of music’s undoubted masterminds. There is no doubt that with her words of inspiration and the powerhouse lyrics to her songs, the world is a far better place thanks to the unstoppable force that is Swift.”
Twist: An American Girl
By Adele Bertei
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero’s journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms trauma into survival. The immediacy of Maddie’s voice is a revelation, providing insight into long-enduring systemic problems without the scrim of adult analysis. In an age of lies and obfuscation, Twist is a sharp yet tender arrow to the heart of naked truth. Bertei reveals what it’s like to be a queer teen at a time when discovery could be fatal. Maddie peers deeply into the American psyche, refusing to consent to the systems of harm. Along the way we encounter an unforgettable schizophrenic mother, Catholic saints, West Side Story and Oliver!, poet killers, the abyss of rape, girl-gangsters and faux-pimps, teenage lesbian sex, racial tensions and misconceived divides, a drag family known as the Holy Maudlins, Vietnam vets in dark and light, cabaret, true family, rock ’n’ roll. And the ultimate saving grace: love. A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view and a glimpse into worlds yet unseen, Twist is good medicine: for readers who’ve experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories. Most of all, it’s for everyone seeking transportive experiences in art and on the page.”
33 1/3: Japan’s Tin Drum
By Agata Pyzik
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tin Drum seeks to provide an outsider look at one of the most mysterious post-punk albums, the 1981 Orientalist and escapist manifesto by the English synth-pop/new wave English band Japan. As an act of cultural appropriation and a meditation on the perils of Western civilisation, seeking solace in a virtual trip to the ‘Orient of the self’ and Maoist ideology, Tin Drum invites external analysis to be culturally appropriated itself. Agata Pyzik tells how the fruitful encounter between the neurotic Western youngsters and dream of the radically other East produced one of the most dissonant and compelling records of the era, too strange to be appreciated at the time, a big hit at the time but too peculiar to be fully understood. Why, at the break of the 1980s and the final decade of the cold war, do these pale aesthetes dream of Mao’s China? At once incredibly English and exotic, futurist and backward-looking, Japan and Tin Drum were a unique exercise in Rimbaudian ‘becoming somebody else’, fascinated in Chinese communism, anticipating the surge of the interest in Chinese Tiger just as it was shaking off Mao’s legacy to become a modern, capitalist economy. Yet the yearning to become ‘different’ expressed in it, both in terms of class and nationality, makes the album’s claim unexpectedly universal.”
R.E.M. Album by Album
By Max Pilley
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “From introverted founders of the alt-rock movement to one of the 20 best-selling American bands of all time, the story of R.E.M. covers three decades, two generations and the passions of millions. First, they lifted a humble, Southern college town into myth, recalibrating rock music at the moment that it threatened to reach the point of terminal excess, and then, unsatisfied, they carried their progressive ideology right into the heart of mainstream popular culture, selling over 85 million records and winning universal acclaim along the way, totally without compromise. R.E.M. Album by Album tells that story, tracing the band from its formation in 1980 when four young men sought respite from the difficulties of real life by starting a covers band, right up until their eventual split in 2011, shedding new light on the lyrical and musical development of the band as artists, from their esoteric early masterpieces to the moment that they signed the world’s largest recording contract. For the very first time, too, we examine the first decade after the band’s demise, scrutinizing the shifting sands of their legacy as the dust settles on one of pop music’s most extraordinary careers.”
Spirit: Every Album, Every Song
By Keith A. Gordon
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Even in an age of unparalleled innovation and artistic freedom, Spirit stood head and shoulders above their 1960s-era rock ’n’ roll contemporaries. Perhaps only Love shared the same sort of expansive and adventurous artistic vision as the five guys in Spirit, whose disparate and diverse musical backgrounds led them to explore the outer regions of rock ’n’ roll as the band incorporated elements of the blues, folk, R&B, and jazz into their heady brew of psychedelia-tinted hard rock. Although they never experienced the level of commercial success that their talents and innovative music deserved, few bands since have matched Spirit in eccentricity, originality, intensity, and instrumental virtuosity. For all their creative accomplishments, Spirit’s legacy is that of a half-forgotten band whose name is seldom brought up in ‘classic rock’ discussions. Spirit: Every Album, Every Song corrects this oversight, revisiting the band’s catalogue, from their ground-breaking self-titled 1968 debut and their masterpiece, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, through the breakups and reunions and solo efforts of the lean years until their resurgence in the 1990s with albums like Tent of Miracles. More than a mere album guide, this book recounts 30 years of the trailblazing artistry of Spirit.”
Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual
By Tamsin Embleton
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This comprehensive manual will help musicians and those working in live music to identify and cope with the various physical and psychological difficulties that can occur during, or as a result of, touring. It covers topics including mental health, peak performance and performance anxiety, addiction, group dynamics, relationship problems, dealing with the media, physical health, diversity and inclusion, crisis management and post-tour recovery. Written by health and performance professionals, this timely and essential book provides robust clinical advice, cutting edge research, practical strategies, resources and detailed illustrations. Each chapter is underpinned with personal recollections from musicians and prominent touring personnel, including Nile Rodgers, Justin Hawkins, Philip Selway, Charles Thompson, Katie Melua , Kieran Hebden, Jake Berry, Tina Farris, Taylor Hanson, Trevor Williams, Lauren Mayberry, Pharoahe Monch, Jim Digby, Will Young, Angie Warner, Dale ‘ Opie’ Skjerseth and many more. Touring and Mental Health is designed to be picked up, put down, read at length and passed around the tour bus.”
Tribute: Loretta Lynn
By Ryan McCall
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This new 30-page edition of the biography comic book of the icon Loretta Lynn. From the coal mines of Kentucky to the biggest stages around the world, Tribute: Loretta Lynn looks at the life and career of the iconic Lynn. The triumphs and tragedies that made her a living Legend are detailed in this comic book from TidalWave Productions. There are bonus pages as well as never-before-seen images and a special cover by Marvel Comics artist Yonami.”
