Contemporary popular music Books

Few rock groups of the '80s broke down as many musical barriers as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Creating an intoxicating new musical style by combining funk and punk rock (with an explosive stage show, to boot), the Chili Peppers spawned a slew of imitators in their wake, but still managed to be the l...

Join the UK's hottest new boyband on their rollercoaster ride to superstardom, with the follow-up to the Number 1 bestselling book One Direction: Forever Young: Our Official X Factor Story. Last year they were just five normal boys, who didn't even know each other, dreaming of being up on stage, wit...

Few of us have experienced life with the intensity, fury, and reckless abandon of Nikki Sixx, the wild rock star, driven entrepreneur, devoted father, former addict, bestselling author, and gifted photographer. "This Is Gonna Hurt" is part photo, part journal - but all Nikki Sixx. It is a collec...

'Someone called and said Kurt died. I just f*****g lost it.' He has sold over 40 million albums. He's been in bands that have changed popular music forever. He saw his best friend commit suicide. He starts supergroups. He's the nicest guy in rock. From a bandmate's suicide to drug abuse, from Wa...

Five boys, five months, one incredible dream. It's crazy to think that five months ago we didn't know each other at all. We were just five guys from different corners of the country, who dreamed of being popstars. Now we've not only found the best friends we've ever had, but we've made it to the fi...

His debut album has already gone platinum. His YouTube videos have received over 10 million hits. He's sung for the President of the United States. His screaming fans have stormed TV studios and shut down shopping malls. Justin Bieber is a global superstar and now, for the first time ever, he's goin...

Winner of the 2011 New Zealand Post "Book of the Year" Award "Come up to Paekakariki in the land of the tiki where you spend all your days at the beach." It's another Saturday night in 1950s Auckland. Downtown, nightclubs are banning the jive because the exuberant couples disturb the cautious fox...

In SCAR TISSUE Anthony Kiedis, charismatic and highly articulate frontman of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recounts his remarkable life story, and the history of the band itself. Raised in the Midwest, he moved to LA aged eleven to live with his father Blackie, purveyor of pills, pot, and cocaine to th...

"Man in the Music" meticulously tracks Jackson's solo career, from 1979's groundbreaking "Off the Wall" to 2001's "Invincible", to a glimpse into some of his yet-to-be-released material. With each album, Vogel places the music in its social and historical context, discu...

With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics and the songs that roused the world, and over four decades he lived the original rock and roll life: taking the chances he wanted, speaking his mind, and making it all work in a way that no one before him had ever done. Now, at la...

 Hagar, the multi-platinum Red Rocker, is best known as the bombastic frontman of VAN HALEN, one of the biggest-selling rock groups in history, and the lead singer of the hard rock group CHICKENFOOT. Hagar provides readers with incredible behind-the-scenes stories from his multi-platinum car...

A prelude to fame, Just Kids recounts the friendship of two young artists--Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe - whose passion fueled their lifelong pursuit of art. In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international su...

'I decided that I wanted to write a little book of essays about songs I loved ...Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else'. In his first non-fiction work since "Fever Pitch", Nick Hornby writes about 31 songs that either have some great significance in his lif...

Companion to a major documentary of the same title released in Fall 2009, which coincided with the band’s silver anniversary. Filmmaker and photographer Phil Griffin followed the band on their 2008 Lost Highway tour and at home, capturing everything from life on the road and onstage to band...

'People ask me how come I'm still alive, and I don't know what to say. When I was growing up, if you'd have put me up against a wall with the other kids from my street and asked me which one of us was gonna make it to the age of sixty, with five kids and four grandkids and houses in Buckinghamshire ...

Authorised by Michael Jackson during his lifetime, this brand new edition includes events surrounding his sad death in 2009. From the fifties to his death in 2009, it is a complete record of Michael's moves, grooves and music. Illustrated with hundreds of colour and black and white photographs, it i...

This is reissue of Michael Jackson's second book, first published in 1992. 'People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song. So, I stay in the moment and listen' - Michael Jackson (1958 - 20...

Mark Blake's history of Pink Floyd - the first for fifteen years - has already been acknowledged as the final word on this remarkable band's life. Lucidly written, incorporating over a hundred new and exclusive interviews, it covers Pink Floyd from their Cambridge beginnings in the early sixties to ...

After bursting on to the Australian music scene in 1975, Dragon fast developed a reputation for both hard rocking and hard living. As the highly visible and charismatic lead singer, Marc Hunter was the voice behind such timeless hits as 'April Sun in Cuba', 'Are You Old Enough?' and 'Rain'. Yet Hunt...

"This Is a Call," the first in-depth, definitive biography of Dave Grohl, tells the epic story of a singular career that includes Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Them Crooked Vultures. Based on ten years of original, exclusive interviews with the man himself and conversations...

You Are Not Alone is an intimate, loving portrait of Michael Jackson, illuminating the private man like never before. It is an invitation into Michael’s real character, private insights and hidden feelings: the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private individual. Jermaine Jackson knew Michael like o...

One of pioneers of modern music in New Zealand, Ray Columbus began his career in 1959 at the tender age of 17. After more than four decades at the top of the New Zealand entertainment industry as a singer, songwriter, bandleader and TV star, and having penned such classics such as 'She's a Mod' and ...

"The Big Payback" takes us from the first $15 made by a "rapping DJ" in 1970s New York to the recent multi-million-dollar sales of the Phat Farm and Roc-a-Wear clothing companies in 2004 and 2007. On this four-decade-long journey from the studios where the first rap records were ...

Whether they played to 80,000 in a stadium or festival, or for a few dozen people in a pub, the world's greatest musical performers have helped change forever our concept of live entertainment. This beautifully-crafted book brings together the best-ever collection of photographs and stories from Ne...

Lady Gaga is a once-in-a-decade artist and the rare instant celebrity whose appearance can become a cultural event. Callahan delivers the first biography of this ever-changing, always surprising, musical phenomenon.

Alongside contemporaries Slayer, Megadeath and Anthrax, Metallica came to prominence in the eighties as one of the 'big four' of thrash metal. Metallica were to thrash, though, what the Sex Pistols were to punk. Nearly thirty years on, their tale is one of the usual metal cocktail of alcohol, heroin...

He is one of the biggest stars that has ever existed, the only key member left from the unquestioned 'biggest band of all time'. But despite the almost unprecedented press coverage he has received throughout his lifetime, the private personality of Paul McCartney remains a source of intrigue and rel...

To rattle off the hits of Neil and Tim Finn reads like a checklist of recent pop history. And to think it all began in sleepy rural Te Awamutu - a town whose name had a 'truly sacred ring', as Neil would famously recount - where Brian Timothy Finn fell in love with the Beatles, an obsession that wou...

When the first edition of this book was published in 2004, it caused enormous controversy, with author Joel McIver's account of Metallica's rise and fall exposing the multiple myths that had surrounded the band for years. For the first time, a book dared to tell the unvarnished truth about their ear...

Set against the frenzied world of heavy metal superstardom, the co-founder of legendary Motley Crue offers an unflinching and gripping look at his own descent into drug addiction. When Motley Crue were at the height of their fame, there wasn't a drug Nikki Sixx wouldn't do. He spent days - sometimes...

Corey Taylor is the hard-living, hard-talking frontman of bands Slipknot and Stone Sour. Renowned for his flamboyant and disturbing stage presence, Corey has lived it all. Starting in the early 90s, Corey threw himself into the hard-drinking, hard-loving, live-for-the-moment-life of a small town...

Few, if any, of AC/DC's fans would have any idea that the band's unmistakeable brand of raucous, hardcore rock was delivered to the world via a small Australian family music publishing business, J. Albert & Son. In fact, the lives of most Australians have been touched in some way by the Alberts, thr...

Rare and exclusive photographs fill the pages of this visual history of Metallica's debut shows in San Francisco. Influenced musically by the new breed of British metal, yet epitomizing the punk rock scene, the band's loud, snotty, and dismissive attitude is evident everywhere in these photographs t...

An engrossing collection of exemplary writing on rock's greatest extended family: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, featuring writing by Cameron Crowe, Ben Fong-Torres, Joel Selvin, and more. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have been hailed as "The American Beatles" and "Folk-Rock's Mount Rushmore. " Th...

From one of the greatest rock guitarists of our era comes a memoir that redefines sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. The long-awaited, never-before-told, no-holds-barred memoir from the legendary Guns N' Roses guitarist. Finally, all the lurid tales of sex, drugs and rock n' roll are revealed as Slas...

In February 2005, more than 10,000 people in Bakersfield, California, watched as Brian “Head” Welch-the former lead guitarist of the controversial rock band Korn-was saved by Jesus Christ. The event set off a media frenzy as observers from around the world sought to understand what led t...

The book begins in 1987 at the point where Crowded House's track 'Don't Dream it's Over' had just reached the top of the singles charts in the United States. It traces the history of guitar music in NZ from this time until the present, showing how local bands have tried to follow this example or hav...

What Britain refined, America defined. Assembled by two key figures at the heart of the movement and told through the voices o musicians, artists, iconoclastic reporters and entrepreneurial groupies, PLEASE KILL ME is the full decadent story of the American punk scene, through the early years of And...

"Ziggy Stardust," "Changes," Under Pressure," "Let's Dance," "Fame," "Heroes," and of course, "Starman." These are the classic songs of David Bowie, the artist whose personas are indelibly etched in our pop consciousness alongside his ...

Duff McKagan was a co-founder of Guns N' Roses, with a 13-year tenure on bass in what was at the time the biggest band on earth. As well as pulling together the classic line-up (Slash on guitar, Steven Adler on drums, rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin and vocalist Axl Rose), Duff was the unofficia...