Who S Crazee Now

As lead singer and extraordinary frontman of SLADE, Noddy Holder was one of the most successful musicians of the '70s and '80s. The epitome of the Glam Rock look and lifestyle, they released anthem after anthem as they mixed pure pop madness with football chant choruses. Seemingly on a mission to corrupt the spelling of a generation, the hits are songs we still hold dear today: MAMA WEER ALL CRAZEE NOW, LOOK WOT YOU DUN, CUM ON FEEL THE NOIZE. . . In a short few years they had 12 top five hits, 6 of them making #1 spot. Their albums also topped the charts and their huge Christmas anthem MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY has entered the top twenty over 7 times. In the '80s Slade made a brilliant revival with even more hits, especially RUN RUN AWAY and the classic MY OH MY. Today Noddy is as loved by the British public as he has ever been and in this hilarious autobiography he will tell us his complete life story, from growing up in the Midlands, to performing in the working men's clubs. The information of their first group, The N'Betweens and the mutation into an unlikely skinhead group, Ambrose Slade. And then, of course, Glam Rock and all the excesses of lifestyle that accompanied the outrageous clothes, not to mention guitarist Dave Hill's incredible hair style.

Drawing on archival sources and oral testimony, Keith Gildart examines the ways in which popular music played an important role in reflecting and shaping social identities and working-class cultures and - through a focus on rock 'n' roll, rhythm & blues, punk, mod subculture, and glam rock - created a sense of crisis in English society.

Which Blondie Top Five was originally a flop for a West Coast power pop band? Who wrote Alice Cooper's 1973 hit 'Hello Hurray', and which folk singer first recorded it? Who launched their career with a tear and a cover of a little known Prince song? Where was Joe Cocker sitting when he came up with the idea of covering 'With a Little Help from my Friends?'. Everybody likes a good song and a good story. The 100 Greatest Cover Versions traces the histories of some of the great songs you may know only as second-hand recordings and explores some unusual and creative takes on a few of pop's well-known tracks. Based on the Independent's popular long-running Story of the Song column, this collection features previously unpublished pieces alongside fully expanded, updated stories. Robert Webb details the background to each song how it was written, who first recorded it and how it came to be covered and explains how, in some cases, the cover version has become more popular than the original. Artists range from Patti Smith to the Happy Mondays, David Bowie to Florence + the Machine, and Stevie Wonder to Robert Wyatt. The book also includes additional further listening suggestions and a bonus track. Whether you download, rip from CD or stream your music, the Ultimate Playlist series provides the perfect accompaniment to your personal compilation. The series aims to guide listeners through large and often bewildering back catalogues of the major artists as well as key genres and styles in popular music. If you love music and you enjoy knowing more about the history behind some of pop's greatest songs, then you will love this book.

Slade were one of the biggest British bands of the 1970s. One of the early pioneers of glam rock, they enjoyed an incredible run of six number-one singles, five top-ten albums and a succession of sell-out tours. However, after a failed attempt at an American breakthrough in the mid-1970s, Slade returned to Britain and faced dwindling record sales, smaller concert halls and a music press that had lost interest in them. By the end of the decade, they were playing residencies in cabaret clubs and recorded a cover of a children’s novelty song. But then came a last-minute invitation to play the 1980 Reading Festival, setting in motion one of the most remarkable comebacks in rock history. It’s now 50 years since Slade’s 1973 annus mirabilis that saw ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’, ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’ and ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ all enter the UK charts at number one, and this book celebrates the music of this legendary band. From their beginnings in the mid-1960s through each year of the decade that gave them their biggest successes, every album and single is examined, as well as coverage of their raucous live shows and colourful media profile. A former politician, Darren spent many years writing about current affairs but after stepping away from politics he was able to devote time to his first love: music. His first book, The Sweet in the 1970s, was published by Sonicbond in 2021, followed by Suzi Quatro in the 1970s in 2022. Now he turns his attention to the first band he truly fell in love with: Slade. A keen follower of both rock and folk, he maintains a popular music blog – Darren’s Music Blog – and has reviewed albums and gigs for a variety of publications. He lives in Hastings, East Sussex.

For Who the Bell Tolls is a book that explains the grammar that people really need to know, such as the fact that an apostrophe is the difference between a company that knows its s*** and a company that knows it's s***, or the importance of capital letters to avoid ambiguity in such sentences as 'I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse.' David Marsh's lifelong mission has been to create order out of chaos. For four decades, he has worked for newspapers, from the Sun to the Financial Times, from local weeklies that sold a few thousand copies to the Guardian, with its global readership of nine million, turning the sow's ear of rough-and-ready reportage into a passable imitation of a silk purse. The chaos might be sloppy syntax, a disregard for grammar or a fundamental misunderstanding of what grammar is. It could be an adherence to 'rules' that have no real basis and get in the way of fluent, unambiguous communication at the expense of ones that are actually useful. Clear, honest use of English has many enemies: politicians, business and marketing people, local authority and civil service jargonauts, rail companies, estate agents, academics . . . and some journalists. This is the book to help defeat them. 'A splendid and, more importantly, sane book on English grammar.' Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon

This book seeks to trace the rise of popular music, identify its key figures and track the origins and development of its multiple genres and styles, all the while seeking to establish historical context. It is, fundamentally, a ready reference guide to the broad field of popular music over the past two centuries. It has become a truism that popular music, so pervasive in the modern world, constitutes a soundtrack to our lives – a constant though changing presence as we cross thresholds and grow from children to teenagers to adults. But it has become more than a soundtrack; it has become a narrative. Not just an accompaniment to our daily lives but incorporating our lives, our sense of identity, our lived experiences, into it. We have become part of the music just as the music has become part of us. The Historical Dictionary of Popular Music contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on major figures across genres, definitions of genres, technical innovations and surveys of countries and regions. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about popular music.

As in his highly acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston invokes an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices to drive his narrative of 1950s Britain. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. Well-known figures are encountered on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.