'I was saying things in songs that female singers didn't really say back then. I wasn't submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up, yet I was very serious.' Brave, beautiful and born to be punk, Debbie Harry is a musician, actor, activist and the iconic face of New York City cool. As the front-woman of Blondie, she and the band forged a new sound that brought together the worlds of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop to create some of the most beloved pop songs of all time. As a muse, she collaborated with some of the boldest artists of the past four decades. In a mix of visceral, soulful storytelling and stunning visuals that include never-before-seen photographs, bespoke illustrations and fan art installations, the book upends the standard music memoir. With all the grit, grime and glory recounted in intimate detail, the book recreates the downtown scene of 1970s New York City, where Blondie played alongside the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Following her path from glorious commercial success to heroin addiction, the near death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy, and Blondie's break-up as a band, to Debbie Harry's multifaceted acting career in more than 30 films, a stunning solo career and a triumphant return of her band, and her tireless advocacy for the environment and LGBTQ rights, here is a cinematic story of a woman who made her own path. Her interest in bees and small anecdotes such as her trip to the cigar shop show small insights into her personality in this chatty and friendly book. 360pp, paperback, packed with illustrations including colour plates and images of this extraordinarily beautiful woman.

A fascinating insight into the golden age of 1970s and 80s rock 'n' roll told through the eyes of music legend Bernie Marsden and most notably his role in establishing one of the world's most famous rock bands of all time - Whitesnake. Touring with AC/DC, befriending The Beatles, writing one of the world's most iconic rock songs, this is the story of a young boy from a small town who dreamt one day of playing the guitar for a living and ended up a rock legend. Bernie's astonishing career in the industry includes tours in Cold War Germany and Franco's Spain to meeting and befriending George Harrison and touring Europe with AC/DC. It's a story of hard graft, of life on the road, and meeting and playing with your heroes, of writing the multi-million selling hit 'Here I Go Again' and, at the age of 30, Bernie leaving Whitesnake due to serious conflict with his management. This is something he explores in this memoir for the very first time. Packed with stories and encounters with the likes of Ringo Starr, Elton John, Cozy Powell, Ozzy Osbourne, B.B. King and Jon Lord, we drift back to a time and a place we won't ever get back again. The glorious David Coverdale writes in 2019 in his Introduction, 'Bernie quite boldly suggested himself for the band I was putting together after Deep Purple. He immediately established himself by playing and singing great, and bringing his excellent sense of derisive humour to the mix, which was a huge part of early Whitesnake... and our choruses inspired the creation of the Almighty Whitesnake Choir - ah, sweet memories. Bernie was truly an invaluable band-mate, friend, musician and co-composer of many of my favourite Whitesnake songs, particularly 'Walking in the Shadow of the Blues' and 'Here I Go Again'.' 274 page paperback with many colour and archive photos.

The Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell produced her ground-breaking album Blue in 1971. It emerged as a singular commercial and critical success around the world and at the time the artist herself puzzled herself over what to give her friends that Christmas. The result was a handmade book with only 100 copies produced, filled with her own handwritten lyrics and reproductions of her many stunning drawings - portraits, abstracts, random concert goers, a road trip psychedelic dream sequence, a very detailed peacock feathered line art princess and Ottoman style palace line drawing, a pensive self-portrait, an aeroplane engine seen just in the fuselage in black and white under a bright zigzag yellow thunderstorm facing a page with the poem 'A Plane is a Bird' dated 28th May 1969. It is all written in her beautiful cursive handwriting, faithfully reproduced in facsimile in this 2019 first edition published by Canongate Books. The album is a better way of understanding what Joni Mitchell found beautiful and worth holding on to, and the lyrics are from her first five albums as well as some unreleased songs, reminding us of what a stunning lyricist and poet she is. In her own words 'This collection of poems and songs and drawings is for myself and for my friends and loves who are this book.' There is a poem about Woodstock, Temptation, and of course the famous Big Yellow Taxi and Let the Wind Carry Me among the 60 lyrics and poems reproduced very neatly with absolutely no crossings out in her own handwriting. Furthermore there are stunning portraits of friends like Jane Lurie in bold psychedelic colours, Judy Collins, Graham Nash, James Taylor, David Crosby, the cover of Court and Spark, Georgia O'Keefe and Neil Young among the 34 full page colour plates. A beautiful big 128 page first edition, 23 x 28.5cm.
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12th and 13th century French chants, Latin carols and absorbing gothic music including Gaudete! from the 15th century, a carol performed by The Richmond Consort are among the 19 tracks on the CD enclosed inside the front cover of this Pitkin Guide. The very word Gothic brings to mind fairy tale castles and baronial halls of Merrie England, yet there is an undercurrent of dungeons and dragons, and torture. This slim introduction looks at the art and architecture of the Middle Ages with examples of church interiors and magnificent cathedrals built to the glory of God, village churches, Englishmen's homes with tracery and gabbled windows such as Stokesay Castle in Shropshire, a look at cults and symbols, the medieval Round Table and a revival with Georgian Gothick. 20 page softback, colour illus.

Iggy Pop with his trademark bare torso has been a constant presence on the rock scene since the late sixties, suffering an eclipse on the first break-up of The Stooges, being rescued by a productive touring and writing partnership with David Bowie, and in the 21st century going on the achieve widespread acclaim. This attractively produced collection of Iggy's lyrics has an "in yer face" vibe that never quite gets out of hand, backed up by some superb archive and recent photography and cutting edge design work. "1969" is "another year with nothing to do", accompanied by a shot of the soulful 21-year-old Iggy charming his audience. Glen Craig, the photographer, recalls Iggy working in a record store in Ann Arbor while working on his first proto-metal album, and "Not right", "Real Cool Time" and "Little Doll" all date from the same productive year. By 1970 Iggy was a radiant blonde, and songs such as "She got a TV eye on me" have a more personal focus, while "Search and Destroy" of 1973 expresses the urgency of the times in "Ain't got time to make no apology, soul radiation in the dead of night". That same year Bowie describes being introduced to "this funny ragged, ragged little guy with broken teeth" by Lou Reed who said, "Don't talk to him, he's a junkie". Iggy is pictured looking mournful and sitting on a bench with Bowie who wears flat cap, check shirt and turned-up jeans. A few pages later Steve Emberton's action photo is the only one he took of Iggy, but still many people's favourite, capturing the extraordinary physicality of the still-young performer. "The Passenger" has an urban theme that "sees the city's ripped backsides, sees the winding ocean drive", anticipating Pop's later city lyrics, eg "Mixin' the colors" of 1993: "If you leave the hate alone tonight, Music's gonna get you home tonight", or the chilling "Little Electric Chair". The lyrics are raw and the photos magnificent in this tremendous tribute compilation. 285pp, black and white and colour photos, almost 100 lyrics. Remainder mark.
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From Funkadelic to Free Bird, from Iggy to Ozzy to Joni, Bowie, Dylan, Marley, Aretha, Marvin, Elton, and Neil, Jackson wisely knocks down the barricades between rock and soul and pop, between guitars and synthesisers, between gospel choirs and Rastafarian chants and crocodile rock, taking it all in sympathetically and judiciously. Discover 1973, one of the great years in musical history. Ziggy Stardust travelled to America in David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. The Dark Side of the Moon began its 937 week run on the Billboard chart inspired by the madness of Pink Floyd's founder, while four ex-Beatles scored top ten albums, two hitting number one. FM battled AM, and Philly strove to supplant Motown on the airwaves. Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy mirrored the rise of funk and reggae. The singer-songwriter movement led by Dylan, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell flourished at the Troubadour and Max's Kansas City, where Springsteen and Marley shared the bill. Photographs include Bowie and Stevie Wonder in a fur coat, hairy mopped New York Dolls and Jagger and Keith Richards backstage with a child. Chapters include AOR, Prog and Yacht Rock, Honky Tonk Heroes, Counter Culture, Country Rock and Quadrophenia, Court and Spark and Headbangers Apotheosis as we keep on truckin' through this slice of modern musical history. With timeline, 428pp, photos.

Everyone has heard, the story of Mozart's life and death: unappreciated, victimised by his rival Salieri, ending up in a pauper's grave. Except that the truth is rather different. This big, detailed biography gives us another Mozart: successful, full of joie de vivre, excited by the new commissions that were coming in and comfortably off with the revenue from his popular operas. When he fell ill in 1791 Wolfgang was enjoying the success of The Magic Flute: "one can feel how this opera is rising and rising". His letters from the same period are full of irrepressible high spirits, describing a practical joke he played on his character Papageno by coming in with a musical accompaniment at the wrong time. This exuberant lark does not seem like someone grappling with his own mortality, but at some point in those last few weeks he did sense that his time had come. In later years his wife Constanze recollected that while composing the Requiem Mozart had claimed that someone was poisoning him. The author of this book is a composer himself and his detailed appreciation of Mozart's musical genius avoids too much technical jargon while taking the reader into the act of creation. Mozart's move to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781 was the turning point in his career under the patronage of Emperor Joseph II. The author argues that the revolutionary undertones sometimes identified in earlier operas such as The Marriage of Figaro are the result of the fact that Mozart was using someone else's libretto and do not imply any revolutionary tendencies of his own. An interesting sidelight on his genius is that the manuscript of the famous aria "Se vuol ballare", which seems to flow so naturally, was changed by Mozart several times even on the final autograph copy. Mozart composed in layers, creating a skeletal score and then adding in the detail. The Flute was a true act of collaboration with his librettist Schikaneder and for that reason Swafford judges the opera to be his greatest work. Mozart's childhood as a prodigy with his sister Nannerl, his private life, marriage to Constanze and the loss of his children are sympathetically integrated into the story. 810pp, colour reproductions. Remainder mark.

Pierre Boulez was not only a great conductor but a highly respected music theorist. This collection of 16 lectures, published here for the first time, shows the maestro at his intellectual peak, providing valuable material for musical and cultural studies both in the UK and in France. Boulez embodied the 20th century musical avant-garde which he had helped to shape, in particular with his electroacoustic experiments and a return to large-scale form. Michel Foucault, icon of poststructuralism, appointed him as a lecturer with the Collège de France, where he gave these talks. Boulez conceived of the lecture series as a single whole, and would deliver each one from his master-plan, though he subsequently revised them for individual publication. His inaugural address situated his research in the context of predecessors and colleagues. The chromaticisms of Wagner and Gesualdo come from different periods and different thought-worlds, representing the consolidation of a dimension of musical language, while in the present, Webern's works have led to a completely new musical language, with thematicism fundamentally reconceived. In 1959 Boulez wrote to Stockhausen proposing a new musical methodology. His lecture "Automatism and Decision" relates to the intrusion of chance on a composition, covering improvisation and spontaneous reactions, the desirability of "showing the workings" and letting the composition be a work in progress. It is highly significant that the title of the final lecture is "Whole or fragment?". Mahler is denounced for triviality, lack of invention and sourcing his ideas from folklore. The breadth of Boulez's cultural reach is exemplified in his reference to T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" which formulates the idea that each work of art necessitates a readjustment of our understanding of everything that precedes it. This is what Boulez means in saying the composer makes sense of memory through new creativity. Endlessly stimulating and a fascinating sidelight on late 20th century cultural theory. 662pp.

24 Preludes, Impromptus. 92 pages, paperback, lies flat easily. 12.5" x 9.5".

Ballades. Lies flat on music stand or piano. 68 pages, paperback. 12.5" x 9.5".