Non-fiction

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 ...

Featuring 666 standout metal songs from 1960 to the present day and illustrated with sleeves, flyers, posters and magazine ads, this is a feast for...

Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their scrupulous and provo...

In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a...

Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward met in the school playground when they were four. They became international stars, first as a trio, then, for almost...

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...

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...

Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his ...

Hip-hop is now a global multi-billion pound industry. It has spawned superstars all across the world. There have been tie-in clothing lines, TV sta...

In November 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned mo...

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 - ...

A relentless innovator, scoring chart hits while simultaneously incorporating radical and ground-breaking elements into his work. As with all great...

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer t...

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. ...

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...

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

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...

For the first time ever, we have all the music in the world to choose from. As Ben Ratliff, one of America's celebrated music critics, shows us, it...

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...

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...

How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterp...

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 was the year that saw the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, ...

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...

'We are not artists nor musicians. We are workers.' Ignoring nearly all rock traditions, experimenting in near-total secrecy in their Düsseldorf st...

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...

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...

The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for ...

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...

In this classic work of music theory Adorno critiques two major composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, who he presents as dialectically ...

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...