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We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Christopher R. Weingarten’s study of Public Enemy – available in North America right now, and in the UK/Europe/RoW from mid-May onwards. Back cover copy: Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing — […]

You may be interested to learn that we’ve just published Peter Mills’ remarkably thorough and erudite study of Van Morrison, Hymns to the Silence. Neither biography nor chronological trawl, Hymns to the Silence is a detailed investigative study of Van Morrison’s remarkable career. Peter Mills engages with his subject in a fresh and accessible style

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a really fascinating (and quite long) article on Alex Chilton’s post-Big Star life in New Orleans today. Among the stand out quotes: “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “Touched by an Angel” fascinated him; he taught himself the “Walker” theme music on guitar.

You may have heard that the Rolling Stones are reissuing “Exile on Main Street” in May, with all sorts of cool bells and whistles, including 10 unreleased songs, some of which were unfinished at the time of discovery and had overdubs added 30 years later… It’ll be interesting to see how those turn out. It’s

Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 on Celine Dion is featured as part of the CBC Book Club’s Music Month of April. He’ll be doing an Ask The Author podcast with book club host Hannah Sung, and if you email questions before April 15, you will also be entered to win a Sony e-reader gadget. Not bad!

Bryan Charles’ book about Pavement is currently at the printers – we should be getting finished copies in the next few days. Here’s an extract from it, and beneath that you’ll find details of a few readings/events Bryan’s doing to support the book’s launch in NYC, Boston, Portland OR and Seattle – if you can

There’s a superb discussion of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and Hawaiian music and culture over at Fluxblog – well worth reading. Dan, of course, is the author of the 33 1/3 volume on Iz’s album Facing Future. (Fun fact: it’s the only 33 1/3 book to have made it into Target so far!) An extract: *** Matthew

Nicholas Rombes, author of the 33 1/3 volume on the Ramones (as well as the excellent Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-82) has a new column about film, over at The Rumpus. It’s called 10/40/70 – the idea being that each column will examine one movie by freezing the frame at 10:00 minutes, 40:00 minutes, and

One more post from Bruce Eaton’s book – I love the way this passage captures such an intense moment for the author and shines a little more light on Chilton’s attitude towards music and performing. *** When Alex arrived from Memphis the afternoon of our show, he was affable and we immediately felt at ease.

Genuinely sad news yesterday, about the death of Alex Chilton. When we published our 33 1/3 book about Radio City just a few months ago, we couldn’t have imagined that Big Star could be gone so soon – the box set was just coming out, the band were playing shows… The book was a truly