A unique account of the Japanese rock phenomenon from a legendary rock musician with an army of fans 'The most obscenely enjoyable book of the year ... enlightening, thrilling and occasionally hilarious ... Cope is a supremely engaging writer whose aim is to entertain, educate and freak out' Telegraph 'This book's astonishing blend of seriousness and hilariousness is testament to perhaps the most remarkable mind in rock today' Word Julian Cope, eccentric and visionary rock musician, follows the runaway underground success of his book Krautrocksampler with Japrocksampler, a cult deconstruction of Japanese rock music, and reveals what really happened when East met West after World War Two. It explores the clash between traditional, conservative Japanese values and the wild rock 'n' roll renegades of the 1960s and 70s, and tells of the seminal artists in Japanese post-war culture, from itinerant art-house poets to violent refusenik rock groups with a penchant for plane hijacking.

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy charts the history of this influential music genre, from its roots in free jazz, psychedelia and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, to the groundbreaking experiments of Faust, Kraftwerk and Can. The late 1960s in West Germany was a period of profound breakthroughs, upheavals and reversals. Out of this climate, a music scene exploded that would forever change the face of western rock; at times anarchic, at others mystical, magickal, or utopian, it pushed rock beyond any known limits. Illustrated with concert photos, posters, record cover art and other rare visual material, and also including essays by Michel Faber, Erik Davis, David Stubbs, Ken Hollings and testimonials from Gavin Russom (Delia and Gavin/Black Meteoric Star), Plastic Crimewave, Stephen Thrower (Coil/Cyclobe), and Ann Shenton (Add N to (X)) this is an essential compendium to a music whose spirit and ideas still vibrate through contemporary culture today.

From the visionary musician, antiquarian and musicologist Julian Cope, comes an alternative history of the last six decades of popular music.

"Welcome to Sardinia: my hell, my home, my prison, my meditation these past sixteen years. What a place to die. But that's precisely why I was back." When drugged-up Time Traveller and '80s musical burnout Rock Section and his fellow English hooligans get kidnapped during Italia '90, there are ruinous implications. But now Rock has returned to Sardinia one final time to settle some scores and uncover the truth. He believes only Dutch cult leader Judge Barry Hertzog, still incarcerated on the island for the crime, can provide the answers. But through prescription drugs, the persistence of his driver Anna and a quest for the hidden ancient doorways strewn around Sardinia's only highway, the 131, Rock will discover that a greater truth awaits him. Judgement, consequences, hoodwinking on a grand scale, Gnosticism versus agnosticism... 131 is a Gnostic whodunit that pursues readers' memories of all previous fiction into a peat bog and impales them with seven-foot-long pikes.

Richard King's account of the several years he spent working in a Bristol independent record shop in the early 90s is destined to become a classic of music writing. We live in an age when the most beautiful of recording formats, vinyl, is back in vogue and thriving. In the early 90s, with the march of the cd and record company disinterest oin the format, vinyl was looking like an anachronism. And with its demise came the gradual erosion of a once beautiful and unique landscape known as the independent record shop. Richard King, author of How Soon is Now, blends memoir and elegiac music writing on the likes of Captain Beefheart, CAN and Julian Cope, to create a book that recalls the debauched glory days of the independent record shop. Chaotic, amateurish and extravagantly dysfunctional, this is a book full of rare personalities and rum stories. It is a book about landscape, place and the personal; the first piece of writing to treat the environment of the record shop as a natural resource with its own peculiar rhythms and anecdotal histories.

"First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Faber and Faber Ltd"--Title page verso.