 This is our story of fifty fantastic years. We started out as a blues band playing the clubs and more recently we've filled the largest stadiums in the world with the kind of show that none of us could have imagined all those years ago. Curated by us, it features the very best photographs and ephemera from and beyond our archives." (Mick, Keith, Charlie & Ronnie). On Thursday 12 July 1962 the Rolling Stones went on stage at the Marquee Club in London's Oxford Street. In the intervening fifty years the Stones have performed live in front of more people than any band...ever. They've played the smallest blues clubs and some of the biggest stadium tours of all time. They've had No.1 singles and albums in every country that has a popular music chart and have helped define global popular culture. A phenomenal half-century later, they now look back at their astounding career. Curated, introduced and narrated by the band themselves, "The Rolling Stones 50" is the only officially authorized book to celebrate this milestone. With privileged access to a wealth of unseen and rare material, it is packed with superb reportage photography, contact sheets, negative strips, out-takes and so much more, from every period in the bands history. With more than 1,000 illustrations, it also features some of the most rare and interesting Stones memorabilia in existence: international posters, draft record cover art, bubblegum cards, jigsaws and other previously unpublished treasures specially photographed for this volume. Additional contributions by photography legends Gered Mankowitz, Jean-Marie Perier, Dezo Hoffmann, Michael Cooper, Terry ONeill, Bent Rej, Philip Townsend and many others make this the definitive book to celebrate fifty years of the Rolling Stones. From Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie here is one spectacular thank you to their fans all over the world.
 'Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream. And Stevie Wonder had a dream. This is a book about dreams.' In the autumn of 1980, Stevie Wonder invited Gil Scott-Heron to join him on a forty-one-city tour across America, ending in Washington in January 1981, to gather popular support for the creation of a holiday in honour of the great civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Scott-Heron uses this history-making tour as the backbone of his fascinating memoir. Raised by his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee, Scott-Heron's journey from humble beginnings to becoming one of the most uncompromising and influential musicians and songwriters of his generation is a remarkable one. Politically savvy and savagely satirical, socially conscious and tender-hearted, Gil Scott-Heron has been called the godfather of rap, and his unexpected death in May 2011 marked the loss of one of the world's most vocal and articulate artists. Chuck D of Public Enemy said of Scott-Heron, 'we do what we do and who we do because of you' and Eminem added, 'Scott-Heron influenced all of hip-hop'. In the words of Sarah Silverman, 'he mirrored ugliness with beauty, audacity, and valour'. A compelling testament to Gil Scott-Heron's career and achievements, The Last Holiday is full of Scott-Heron's keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy and our wider place in the world.
Review: Gil Scott-Heron is timeless. - New York Times
Author Biography: In a musical career spanning five decades, from Small Talk at 125th and Lenox to I'm New Here, Gil Scott-Heron (1949 - 2011) released twenty albums and many seminal singles including 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is', 'Winter in America', 'B Movie', 'JohanA--nesburg' and 'Lady Day and John Coltrane'. He was also the author of three previous books ‒ two novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron.
 The first book to make sense of 21st Century pop, "Retromania" explores rock's nostalgia industry of revivals, reissues, reunions and remakes, and argues that there has never before been a culture so obsessed with its own immediate past. Pulling together parallel threads from music, fashion, art, and new media, Simon Reynolds confronts a central paradox of our era: from iPods to YouTube, we're empowered by mind-blowing technology, but too often it's used as a time machine or as a tool to shuffle and rearrange music from yesterday. We live in the digital future but we're mesmerized by our analogue past.
Reviews:
"Amazing." --Bruce Sterling, Wired.com
"Looking back over the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining the zeitgeist." --Dave Haslam, The Guardian
"Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop . . . A devastating critique of the way music is now consumed." --Patrick Sawer, The Daily Telegraph
"Bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time--as well as to place--"Retromania" deserves to be very widely read." --Sukhdev Sandhu, The Observer (London)
Author Biography: Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and, most recently, Bring The Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.
 This is the story of Alex James's transition from a leading light of the Britpop movement in the 1990s, to gentleman farmer, artisan cheese-maker and father of five. All Cheeses Great and Small is the follow-up memoir to Alex James's first book, Bit of a Blur, the story of his excessive pop star lifestyle during the nineties. But now Alex has grown up, fallen in love and got married. He has also fallen passionately for his new home, an enormous rambling farmhouse in the Cotswolds, set in two hundred acres of beautiful British countryside. The farm represents not just a new house for Alex, but also a new career. As he breathes new life into the old farm he chances across an unexpected calling: making cheese. His cheeses, Blue Monday, Farleigh Wallop and Little Wallop have received widespread media interest and are now sold through many outlets. The story culminates with an account of the triumphant reformation of Blur for Glastonbury 2009. It will also include illustrations by Graham Coxon.
Review:
'Alex James is a witty, engaging guide to the mad goings-on behind the scenes of Britpop. Blur's bassist famously estimates that he blew around GBP1m on champagne and cocaine during the nineties. Here's how.' Independent
'Bright, passionate ! James writes with wit and flair.' Time Out
'The definitive guide to Britpop ! this effervescent memoir emerges as the most fascinating, as well as hilarious, document to date of those times.' Observer
Author Biography: Writer, musician and cheesemaker Alex James is bestknown as the bass player in Blur, a time he chronicled in his acclaimed first book Bit of a Blur. Alex James lives on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife and five children. He writes a weekly column on all things food for the Sun, as well a regular column on farm and family life for the Sunday Telegraph.
 When Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, France went into mourning: Francois Mitterand himself proclaimed him "our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire."
Gainsbourg redefined French pop, from his beginnings as cynical chansonnier and mambo-influenced jazz artist to the ironic "ye-ye" beat and lush orchestration of his 1960s work to his launching of French reggae in the 1970s to the electric funk and disco of his last albums.
But mourned as much as his music was Gainsbourg the man: the self-proclaimed ugly lover of such beauties as Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, the iconic provocateur whose heavy-breathing "Je t'aime moi non plus" was banned from airwaves throughout Europe and whose reggae version of the "Marseillais" earned him death threats from the right, and the dirty-old-boy wordsmith who could slip double-entendres about oral sex into the lyrics of a teenybopper ditty and make a crude sexual proposition to Whitney Houston on live television.
Gilles Verlant's biography of Gainsbourg is the best and most authoritative in any language. Drawing from numerous interviews and their own friendship, Verlant provides a fascinating look at the inner workings of 1950s-1990s French pop culture and the conflicted and driven songwriter, actor, director and author that emerged from it.
The young boy wearing a yellow star during the German Occupation; the young art student trying to woo Tolstoy's granddaughter; the musical collaborator of Petula Clark, Juliette Greco and Sly and Robbie; the seasoned composer of the "Lolita" of pop albums, "Histoire de Melody Nelson"; the cultural icon who transformed scandal and song into a new form of delirium.
Release Date: June 2012
 Following the success of Hans Ulrich Obrist's A Brief History of Curating, this publication gathers the influential curator's interviews with some of the foremost musicians and composers of the 1950s-1990s.
It brings together leading avant-garde composers of the early postwar period such as Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen; pioneers of electroacoustic music such as François Bayle, Pauline Oliveros, Iannis Xenakis and Peter Zinovieff; minimalist and Fluxus-inspired artist-musicians such as Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Phil Niblock, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and Terry Riley; and figures that have moved between classical/experimental realms and more pop terrain, such as Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Howie B., Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso.
Obrist's interviews map the evolution of the new music in Europe and America across all of its genres, from musique concrète to the recent hybridizations between pop and avant-garde, as techniques from both realms cross-pollinate.
A Brief History of New Music is an ideal introduction to the experimental and new classical music of the past half-century.
Release Date: July 2012
 Robert Crumb first began drawing record covers in 1968 when Janis Joplin asked him to provide a cover for her album Cheap Thrills. It was an invitation that the budding artist couldn't resist, especially since he had been fascinated with record covers since he was a teenager. This early collaboration proved so successful that Crumb went on to draw hundreds of record covers for both new artists and forgotten masters. So remarkable were Crumb's artistic interpretations of these old 78 rpm singles that the art itself proved influential in their rediscovery in the 1960s and 1970s. Including such classics as Truckin' My Blues Away, Harmonica Blues and Please Warm My Weiner, Crumb's opus also features more recent covers done for CDs. The Complete Record Cover Collection is a must-have for any lover of graphics and American music.
Author Biography: Included are R. Crumb's designs for Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie, Frank Zappa, Artie Shaw and many other artists. Author website: www.crumbproducts.com
 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 success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years--the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.
Reviews:
'The most beautiful, incredible autobiography - it will make you ache for a time and a place that you probably never knew, New York in the 1970s' - Nick Hornby
'A sharp, elegiac and finely crafted tribute to their childlike, pre-fame romance, set against the thrilling back drop of New York's countercultural blast' - Sunday Times
'Terrifically evocative ... The most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late '60s and '70s that any alumnus has committed to print' - New York Times
'A tender, harrowing, often hilarious portrait of young lovers forging their paths in an eccentric milieu of Beat poets, Warhol socialites, and transvestites, rock stars and artists ... Much has been written about that time, but Just Kids offers new insight' - Vogue
Author Biography: Patti Smith is a writer, artist and performer. She has recorded ten albums and written five books, and her artwork has been exhibited worldwide. In 2005 she received the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest grade awarded by the French Republic to eminent artists and writers who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts throughout the world. She lives in New York City.
 _For Australian teenagers of the 1980s and 90s, Smash Hits magazine provided a fortnightly fix of fun, glamour and pop. It had more fizz than a sherbet bomb, and hundreds of thousands of Australian teenagers were hooked. Pop Life is an insiders' view of the Australian pop lovers' bible, from its bubbly beginnings to digitaldemise. Three former Smash Hits writers and editors take an affectionate and irreverent jaunt down memory lane. And reveal how they, Australia and readers have changed along the way.
 As he did in the acclaimed Finishing the Hat Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with personal and theatre history, discussions of his collaborations, and exacting, charming dissections of his work - both the successes and the failures.
Picking up where he left off in Finishing the Hat he gives us all the lyrics, along with cutouts and early drafts, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Sunday in the Park with George", as well as "Into the Woods", "Assassins", and "Passion".
Here too is an in-depth look at "Wise Guys", subsequently transformed into "Bounce", and eventually into "Road Show". And we are treated to chapters on his work for television and film and his "orphan songs", culled from parodies and special occasions over the years.
Filled with behind-the-scenes photographs and illustrations from original manuscripts, and with the same elegant design as the earlier book, Look, I Made A Hat will be devoured by Sondheim's passionate fans today and for years to come.
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