Spacemen 3 are the greatest rock band of which you've never heard. This briefly surveys the backgrounds of songwriters Pete 'Sonic Boom' Kember and Jason 'Spacemen' Pierce during their childhood years and adolescent collaborations, from which would forge cult-icons Spacemen 3. It recounts the highs and lows of a backwater band whose history is littered with excess, heroin addiction and ambition. Author Erik Morse also paints a history of the British indie-rock scene of the mid 80s from its post-punk roots to the earliest days of acid house and Spacemen 3's role in reinventing psychedelia for a new generation including bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine. Includes interviews from several major players in and around Spacemen 3 who recount the now legendary concerts, road tours and behind the scenes myths surrounding the recording of the underground classics Perfect Prescription and Playing with Fire. It uncovers the yet untold stories of greed and ambition that came from business impresarios to major labels and the inevitable collapse of the band at the end of the 80s. Morse looks at the earliest days of offspring bands Spectrum and Spiritualized founded by Kember and Pierce following the dissolution of Spacemen 3. Contains discography of Spacemen 3 as well as early releases from Spectrum and Spiritualized as well as rare bootlegs and live recordings.

I can confirm that should you ever find yourself on stage playing the bass guitar with tree left hands, it is usually the one in the middle that is the real one. The other two are probably phantoms. Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands tells the story of one of the most influential, revered and ultimately demented British bands of the 1980s, Spacemen 3. In classic rock n roll style they split up on the brink of their major breakthrough. As the decade turned sour and acid house hit the news, Rugby's finest imploded spectacularly, with Jason Pierce (aka Jason Spaceman) and Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) going their separate ways. Here, Will Carruthers tells the whole sorry story and the segue into Spirtualised in one of the funniest and most memorable memoirs committed to the page.

This text presents a comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on popular music, from the early 20th century to the present day.

The greatest albums of all time . . . and how they happened. Organised chronologically and spanning seven decades, The MOJO Collection presents an authoritative and engaging guide to the history of the pop album via hundreds of long-playing masterpieces, from the much-loved to the little known. From The Beatles to The Verve, from Duke Ellington to King Tubby and from Peggy Lee to Sly Stone, hundreds of albums are covered in detail with chart histories, full track and personnel listings and further listening suggestions. There's also exhaustive coverage of the soundtrack and hit collections that every home should have. Like all collections, there are records you listen to constantly, albums you've forgotten, albums you hardly play, albums you love guiltily and albums you thought you were alone in treasuring, proving The MOJO Collection to be an essential purchase for those who love and live music.

“We have performed side-by-side on the global stage through half a century…. In Lightning Striking, Lenny Kaye has illuminated ten facets of the jewel called rock and roll from a uniquely personal and knowledgeable perspective.” –Patti Smith An insider’s take on the evolution and enduring legacy of the music that rocked the twentieth century Memphis 1954. New Orleans 1957. Philadelphia 1959. Liverpool 1962. San Francisco 1967. Detroit 1969. New York, 1975. London 1977. Los Angeles 1984 / Norway 1993. Seattle 1991. Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters, and visionaries; how each generation came to be; how it was discovered by the world. Whether describing Elvis Presley’s Memphis, the Beatles’ Liverpool, Patti Smith’s New York, or Kurt Cobain’s Seattle, Lightning Striking reveals the communal energy that creates a scene, a guided tour inside style and performance, to see who’s on stage, along with the movers and shakers, the hustlers and hangers-on--and why everybody is listening. Grandly sweeping and minutely detailed, informed by Kaye’s acclaimed knowledge and experience as a working musician, Lightning Striking is an ear-opening insight into our shared musical and cultural history, a magic carpet ride of rock and roll’s most influential movements and moments.

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.

DIVMudhoney: The Sound and the Fury from Seattle is the first-ever history of Mudhoney, the four-man Seattle band that invented grunge, written with the band’s full cooperation./div