'The NME mattered to all those generations who grew up with music at the centre of their universe. The NME never had a truer chronicler than Pat Long.' Tony Parsons Since it was founded in 1952, the New Musical Express has played a central part in the British love affair with pop music. Snotty, confrontational, enthusiastic, sarcastic: the NME landing on the doormat every Wednesday was the high point of any music fan’s week, whether they were listening to The Beatles, Bowie or Blur. The Sex Pistols sang about it, Nick Hornby claims he regrets not working for it and a whole host of household names – Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, Nick Kent and Mick Farren, Steve Lamacq and Stuart Maconie – started their career writing for it. This authoritative history, written by former assistant editor, Pat Long, is an insider's account of the high times and low lives of the world's most famous, and most influential, music magazine. The fights, the bands, the brawls, the haircuts, the egos and much more. This is the definitive – and first – book about the infamous NME.

Rock Criticism from the Beginning is a wide-ranging exploration of the rise and development of rock criticism in Britain and the United States from the 1960s to the present. It chronicles the evolution of a new form of journalism, and the course by which writing on rock was transformed into a respected field of cultural production. The authors explore the establishment of magazines from Crawdaddy! and Rolling Stone to The Source, and from Melody Maker and New Musical Express to The Wire, while investigating the careers of well-known music critics like Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, and Lester Bangs in the U.S., and Nik Cohn, Paul Morley, and Jon Savage in the U.K., to name just a few. While much has been written on the history of rock, this Bourdieu-inspired book is the first to offer a look at the coming of age of rock journalism, and the critics that opened up a whole new kind of discourse on popular music.

Has pop burnt itself out? Inspired by the video for Kylie Minogue's hit single 'Can't Get You Out of My Head', acclaimed rock journalist Paul Morley is driving with Kylie towards a virtual city built of sound and ideas in search of the answer. Their journey bridges the various paradoxes of twentieth-century culture, as they encounter a succession of celebrities and geniuses - including Madonna, Kraftwerk, Wittgenstein and the ghost of Elvis Presley - and explore the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical and the digital, the avant-garde and the very nature of pop itself.

Chronicling Nick Kent's up-close , personal, often harrowing adventures with the Rolling Stones, Lester Bangs, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, and Chrissie Hynde, among scores of others, Apathy for the Devil is a picaresque memoir that bears witness to the beautiful and the damned of this turbulent decade. As a college dropout barely out of his teens, Kent's first five interviews were with the MC5, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, the Stooges, and Lou Reed. But after the excitement and freedom of those early years, his story would come to mirror that of the decade itself, as he slipped into excess and ever-worsening heroin use. Apathy for the Devil is a compelling story of inspiration, success, burn out, and rebirth from a classic wordsmith.