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In a mix of interviews, essays, personal stories, historical snapshots, obscure anecdotes, and think pieces, this second expanded edition dissects, analyzes and celebrates ska in exactly the way fans have been craving for decades. With the addition of 4 new sections, Aaron adds to the already extensive compendium that was the first edition: The Importance of Christian Ska; After ska died in the '90s, the music went underground and returned to its roots; The ska roots of Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump; How Katrina created a vibrant ska scene in New Orleans. Aaron expands on the original edition with exciting interviews with Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy who he interviewed on his podcast of the same name. In Defense of Ska: Ska Now More Than Ever is the much-needed response to years of ska-mockery. Now the time to take to the streets and fight music snobbery, or at least crank up the ska without being teased ruthlessly, has come. This book will enlist ska-lovers as soldiers in the ska army and challenge ska-haters' prejudices to the core.
*** This is the story of the great lost Beatles album. The end of the Beatles wasn't inevitable. It came through miscommunication, misunderstandings and missed opportunities to reconcile. But what if it didn't end? What if just one of those chances was taken, and the Beatles carried on? What if they made one last, great album? In Like Some Forgotten Dream, Daniel Rachel - winner of the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize - looks at what could have been. Drawing on impeccable research, Rachel examines the the Fab Four's untimely demise - and from the ashes compiles a track list for an imagined final album, pulling together unfinished demos, forgotten B-sides, hit solo songs, and arguing tha...
I Just Can't Stop It is the honest and compelling autobiography from British Music Legend, Ranking Roger. As the enigmatic frontman of the multicultural band The Beat, Ranking Roger represented the youthful and joyous sound of the post-punk 2 Tone movement. As well as his illustrious career with The Beat and its subsequent iterations, this absorbing book explores Roger's upbringing as a child of the Windrush generation, touring America and his outstanding collaborations with artists such as The Clash, The Police and The Specials.
In 1979, 2 Tone Records was founded by Jerry Dammers, the founder and keyboard player in The Special AKA. He had a vision and wanted to create the British version of Motown, the similarities with his hometown of Coventry were already there. He'd already put his own band of black and white musicians together and they hit the charts with the release of Gangsters in 1979. 2 Tone then went on to sign and release records by other bands, Madness, The Selecter and The Beat, all of whom fused punk, ska and reggae and dragged it into the present. The record label had no fewer than 15 Top 40 singles and they continued the trend, signing The Swinging Cats, Rico and even released a single by Elvis Coste...
Dog is a cat- the only problem is that he doesn't behave like one! Instead he wags his tail, sticks out his tongue and yaps in a manner which is distinctly puppyish. Something has to be done! The pride of cats is at stake - the shame of an entire species a consequence of allowing a feline to behave in such a disgraceful canine manner.
Born in 1953 to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents, Pauline Black was subsequently adopted by a white, working class family in Romford. Never quite at home there, she escaped her small town background and discovered a different way of life - making music. Lead singer for platinum-selling band The Selecter, Pauline Black was the Queen of British Ska. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she toured with The Specials, Madness, Dexy's Midnight Runners when they were at the top of the charts - and, sometimes, on their worst behaviour. From childhood to fame, from singing to acting and broadcasting, from adoption to her recent search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening story of music, race, family and roots.
Step into the booth. Check your judgments at the curtain. Close your eyes. Listen: you can hear the voices of the visitors who sat here before you: some of the most twisted, drug-addled, deviant, lonely, lost, brilliant characters ever to be caught on film. What do you have to offer the booth?
Facing a life of poverty, neglect, abandonment and even homelessness, young Jamaican boys are placed in a disciplinarian Catholic boarding school. With a rigorous musical training program overseen by an eccentric jazz-loving nun, the young virtuoso graduates of Alpha Boys' School went on to change the shape of music forever. It's the 1950s in Jamaica and a musical revolution is brewing. People all over Kingston dance nightly to vast outdoor sound systems blasting American rhythm and blues records across the shanty towns. In the hotels and theaters big bands are playing jazz and calypso. Street musicians are playing home-grown folk music called mento. Out of this musical stew, Jamaica will so...
Falling drunk into Stephen Hawking's wheelchair didn't seem to bother the 23-year-old Canadian. Considering he had already been tied naked to a roundabout and vomited into a vacuum cleaner, Antony was thinking his return to the UK was going quite well. But that all changed in the summer of 1993, when he visited his great-aunt-or what was left of her. Someone had wanted her dead, and whatever secrets she held, a brick to the head made sure she took them to her grave. The murder weapon he knew all too well. It was no ordinary brick. It was a "clover," one of thousands his great-grandfather had made at the end of the Victorian era. He knew little about the family business or the souvenir empire...
Walls Come Tumbling Down charts the pivotal period between 1976 and 1992 that saw politics and pop music come together for the first time in Britain's musical history; musicians and their fans suddenly became instigators of social change, and 'the political persuasion of musicians was as important as the songs they sang'. Through the voices of campaigners, musicians, artists and politicians, Daniel Rachel follows the rise and fall of three key movements of the time: Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone, and Red Wedge, revealing how they all shaped, and were shaped by, the music of a generation. Composed of interviews with over a hundred and fifty of the key players at the time, Walls Come Tumbling Down is a fascinating, polyphonic and authoritative account of those crucial sixteen years in Britain's history.