Memoirs & Journals

Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. Their ...

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...

Photographs by Terry O'Neill, Norman Parkinson, Michael Ward and Derek Bayes The Beatles ascended like no band before, hurtling to the dizzy height...

Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, hi...

Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life - a list that formed something akin to a...

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...

Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with...

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is a landmark celebration of the remarkable life and career of a country music and pop culture legend. ...

Elton John and iconic photographer Terry O'Neill worked together for many years, taking in excess of 5,000 photographs. From intimate backstage sho...

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...

High School is the revelatory and unique coming-of-age story of Sara and Tegan Quin, identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, growing up in the heigh...

This enthralling book is the first biography in English of Bill Evans, one of the most influential of all jazz pianists. Peter Pettinger, himself a...

Before Carrie Brownstein became a music icon, she was a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest just as it was becoming the setting for one ...

It's been said Janis Joplin was second only to Bob Dylan as the 'creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation's mythology'. But how did a middle-c...

Patti Smith's exquisite prose is generously illustrated in this full-color edition of her classic coming-of-age memoir, Just Kids. New York locatio...

Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimo...

In Letters of Note: Music, Shaun Usher brings together a riveting collection of letters by and about some of the musicians and music that enrich ou...

The fourth of five children, Aretha was born in Tennessee and took the stage at an early age in her father's church choir. She went on to become th...

Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota. As a teenager, he played in various bands and, over time, his interest in music deepened, with a particula...

As a child, young David had a head full of songs and ideas. He was inspired by the pop and mod scenes in Britain to pick up the saxophone. After ea...

Little Dolly grew up in Tennessee in a family 'as poor as dirt'. She started performing at an early age, singing on local radio and television. Aft...

Ella Fitzgerald grew up near Harlem, in New York, where she was surrounded by music and dance. After winning first prize in a talent competition at...

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...

From the Yardbirds to Cream, Blind Faith to Derek and the Dominos, and a hugely-successful solo career, Eric Clapton's fifty years in the music bus...

Mozart’s music has enthralled listeners for centuries. In this brilliant biography, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson draws upon his expert knowledg...

translated by Lady Wallace Mozart's remarkable life was well and richly documented in letters: his own and those concerning him written by others. ...

There has never been a band like Pearl Jam. The Seattle quintet has recorded eleven studio albums; sold some 85 million records; played over a thou...

Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who mad...

No other pop group in recent history has faced fame with such intelligence, humour and shrewdness as the Pet Shop Boys. In 1991, the band toured No...

The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most successful and unusual bands of the last five decades. They are the pop duo that proves pop music can be mode...

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

Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chi...

The Fall are one of the most distinctive British bands ever, their music - odd, spare, cranky and repetitious - an acknowledged influence on The Sm...

In this acclaimed new memoir, New York Times bestselling author Neil Young has fashioned another extraordinary work of reminiscences told through t...

Peter Asher met the Beatles in the spring of 1963, the start of a lifelong association with the band and its members. He had a front-row seat as th...

A collection of the very first, the very last, and the very best interviews conducted with Prince over his nearly 40 year career. There is perhaps ...

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...

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...

In this candid and riveting autobiography Graham Nash tells it all: the love, the sex, the jealousy, the drugs, and the magical music-making. This ...

Over fifty years after his death, Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) is celebrated as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. But before he was setting guit...

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

Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to ...