A landmark history of post-punk, the basis of the documentary film directed by Nikolaos Katranis Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Provides profiles of solo performers, bands, producers, and record labels from the alternative rock movement, ranging from the mid-1970s to the present, and includes discographies, album reviews, and photographs.

British Punk music has created a genre of simplistic but dynamic Rock 'n' Roll that shook the stiff establishment during dreadful years in 1976 to 1979. Skrewdriver was one of those protagonists on their quest for rebellion and fame. A band labelled as infamous, but their early Punk 'career' remained often nebulous. 'A Case of Pride' is the full story of young adventures told in an unstained and authentic way...

The first major book on the post-punk legends! Wire were the seventies band who perhaps did more than any other to usher in the post-punk age. Author Paul Lester has interviewed the four original members of Wire - Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert - as well as many of their producers and collaborators. Charts the band's history from their days at Watford Art College through their abrasive encounters with punk audiences hostile to their groundbreaking material on albums like Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. and their 2008 release Object 47. Those albums were to exert an enormous influence on subsequent generations of alternative rock musicians. To bands as diverse as Black Flag, Blur, R.E.M. and My Bloody Valentine, Wire's expansion of the sonic possibilities of rock proved highly significant. Lester has also followed the band's story as it expanded into a melee of break-ups, reformations, parallel projects and solo forays, culminating in their current status as a sort of British Velvet Underground: cultish and modest-selling but uncompromising and immeasurably influential.

Seditious Theology explores the much analysed British punk movement of the 1970s from a theological perspective. Imaginatively engaging with subjects such as subversion, deconstruction, confrontation and sedition, this book highlights the stark contrasts between the punk genre and the ministry of Jesus while revealing surprising similarities and, in so doing, demonstrates how we may look at both subjects in fresh and unusual ways. Johnson looks at both punk and Jesus and their challenges to symbols, gestures of revolt, constructive use of conflict and the shattering of relational norms. He then points to the seditious pattern in Jesus' life and the way it can be discerned in some recent trends in theology. The imaginative images that he creates provide a challenging image of Jesus and of those who have relooked radically in recent years at what being a ’seditious’ follower of Christ means for the church. Introducing both a new partner for theological conversation and a fresh way of how to go about the task, this book presents a powerful approach to exploring the life of Christ and a new way of engaging with both recent theological trends and the more challenging expressions of popular culture.

LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today.