Rip It Up

'A fantastic tribute to an amazingly creative musical period . . . An instant pop classic, worthy of a place on your shelves beside the handful of music books that really matter.' John McTernan, Scotland on Sunday Punk revitalized rock in the mid-seventies, but the movement soon degenerated into self-parody. Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length celebration of what happened next: post-punk bands who dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk's unfinished musical revolution. 1978 - 1984 rivals the sixties for the sheer amount of fabulous music created, the spirit of adventure and possibility that infused it, and the way the sounds felt inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of the day. Simon Reynolds, acclaimed author of Energy Flash, recreates a time of tremendous urgency and idealism in pop music. Packed with anecdote and insight, populated by charismatic and maverick characters, Rip It Up and Start Again stands as one of the most inspired and inspiring books on popular music ever written. 'I had never expected there to be a book on this subject; had I done so, I would never have dared to hope it could be as good as this.' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Book of the Week 'This remarkable and perfectly timed cultural history is required reading.' Q Magazine

NPR Great Read of 2016 From the acclaimed author of Rip It Upand Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop. Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas. Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre’s major themes—stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse—Reynolds tracks glam’s legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists’ obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

Rip up this book and unleash your hidden potential Most self-help books encourage you to think differently; to think yourself thin, imagine a richer self or to visualize the perfect you. This is difficult, time consuming and often doesnâe(tm)t work. Drawing on a dazzling array of scientific evidence, psychologist Richard Wiseman presents a radical new insight that turns conventional self-help on its head: simple physical actions represent the quickest, easiest and most powerful way to instantly change how you think and feel. So don't just think about changing your life. Do it. *Discover the simple idea that changes everything *Lose weight * Stop smoking * Feel instantly younger

Tossing out the rule book, Wiseman--a renowned psychologist with 90,000 Twitter followers and 13 million YouTube viewers--presents a radical new insight on how actions have the power to instantly change the way people think and feel.

Rip it up' charges through the astonishing story of Scottish pop and rock music from the 1950s to the present day. It talks about the main players and protagonists, showing the evolution of myriad idiosyncratic genres and styles over seven decades. This book will accompany a major exhibition and a BBC Scotland TV series, presented by Vic Galloway, which explore the musical culture of Scotland from Lonnie Donegan to Calvin Harris. 0The exhibition features clothes, photographs, instruments, memorabilia, props, film and, of course, music as well as interviews and archive footage. For a country of around only five million people Scotland has punched above its weight in shaping the twentieth century's most important, accessible and radical art form - pop and rock music - which has gone on to influence film, fashion, design, visual art and politics. With added socio-political and economic context the book demonstrates how influential and vital Scottish acts have been over the years.00Exhibition: National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK (22.6. - 25.11.2018).

From the author of the bestselling postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again comes Totally Wired, a companion book of conversations with the brilliant minds who made the late seventies and early eighties such a creative era for radical music and alternative culture. Totally Wired features thirty-two interviews with postpunk's most innovative musicians and colourful personalities - Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Green Gartside, Lydia Lunch, Edwyn Collins - as well as other movers and shakers of the period: label bosses and managers like Anthony H. Wilson and Bill Drummond, record producers such as Trevor Horn and Martin Rushent, and influential DJs and journalists like John Peel and Paul Morley. Crackling with argument and anecdote, the conversations in Totally Wired bring a rich human dimension to the postpunk story chronicled in the critically acclaimed Rip It Up. We get to follow these exceptional (and often eccentric) characters from their earliest days through the glory and sometimes disaster of their musical adventures to what they went on to do after postpunk. We gain a vivid sense of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day. Along with the interviews, Totally Wired also includes a bonus 'overviews' section: further reflections by Simon Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, art school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery. Buzzing with ideas and insights, Totally Wired is an absolute mind rush.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis Japan The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on. Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O'Horan.

"The essential book on post-punk music, a must for any serious pop music fan"