Art & Design

Formed as a New York City hardcore band in 1981, Beastie Boys struck an unlikely path to global hip hop superstardom. Here is their story, told for...

Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows....

From Morrissey and Nick Cave to The Streets and Kanye West, this is the book that explores the links between hip-hop and rock. Reynolds has focused...

In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music but it never occurred to her she could be in a band as she couldn't play an instrument and she'd nev...

No other jazz musician has proved so inspirational and so fascinating as John Coltrane. Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for the New York Times, has writte...

Eschewing the usual criteria of chart success or acknowledged influence, the Copendium - a collection of album reviews and themed track samplers - ...

In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music-making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been han...

Jon Savage's Ralph Gleason Award-winning England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and their time: the lat...

Grunge, also known as the 'Seattle Sound', emerged from the Pacific north-west in the early part of the 1980s. With the unexpected success of Nirva...

By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, Nor...

In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story. She writes frankly about he...

Spanning Tom Waits' extraordinary 40-year career, from Closing Time to Orphans, Lowside of the Road is Barney Hoskyns' unique take on one of rock's...

Legendarily reticent, perverse and misleading, Prince is one of the few remaining 80s superstars who still, perhaps, remains unexplained. Now a fir...

In this, the first book to take a big-picture view of the entire post punk period, acclaimed author and music journalist Simon Reynolds recreates a...

As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the world: GLAM! In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of ...

In The Dark Stuff Nick Kent profiles twenty-two of the most gifted and self-destructive talents in rock history. From Brian Wilson to Syd Barrett, ...

Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive ...

Through a series of exquisitely observed autobiographical sketches, Adrian Tomine explores his life - from an early moment on the playground being ...

Over the course of two albums and some legendary gigs, Joy Division became the most successful and exciting underground band of their generation. T...

Viv Albertine has always been obsessed with the truth: the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. But at what cost? I...

Disco emerged from the fall-out of the Black Power Movement and an almost exclusively gay scene in a blaze of poppers, strobe lights, tight trouser...

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, heard in Hollyw...

Rapturous in its ability to depict the creative process, Words Without Music allows readers to experience that sublime moment of creative fusion wh...