Gift Guide for Music Lovers

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This Christmas, our Booksellers have been busy curating gifting guides to suit all. Whether you're buying for that cousin who lives to travel, a Cricket obsessed uncle; looking for the perfect gift for little ones, big ones or difficult ones, we've got you covered.

Presenting our Gifting Guide for Music Fans:

Last Rites

Ozzy Osbourne

Last Rites is the shocking, bitterly hilarious, never-before-told story of Ozzy's descent into hell. Along the way, he reflects on his extraordinary life and career, including his marriage to wife Sharon, as well as what it took for him to get back onstage for the triumphant Back to the Beginning concert, streamed around the world, where Ozzy reunited with his Black Sabbath bandmates for the final time. Unflinching, brutally honest, but surprisingly life-affirming, Last Rites demonstrates once again why Ozzy has transcended his status as 'The Godfather of Metal' and 'The Prince of Darkness' to become a modern-day folk hero and national treasure.

Bread of Angels

Patti Smith

‘God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper’, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as ‘Horses’ and ‘Easter’, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.

Everything We Do is Music

Elizabeth Alker

The worlds of pop and rock owe a much greater debt to the classical canon than we realise. A direct and fascinating lineage draws from the experimentalism of Pierre Henry to The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows', from Stockhausen to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' and from Bruckner to Sonic Youth via Glenn Branca. In Everything We Do is Music, Elizabeth Alker shines a light on the fertile ground that exists between the borders of classical music and pop. She showcases the innovators of the former and their fans and collaborators in the latter, and explores how together these artists challenged the notion that such musical worlds are mutually exclusive.

Fela: Music Is the Weapon

Jibola Fagbamiye (author), Conor McCreery (author)

In this bold and striking graphic novel, artist Jibola Fagbamiye and writer Conor McCreery team up to tell the remarkable origin story of one of Nigeria’s most famous sons, the King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, who rose to superstardom with his band Africa 70 in the 1970s, during a charged political period for his nation. Chronicling Fela’s perilous journey to capture his destiny—to become the King of Afrobeat, and to advocate for Pan-African unity in the face of European imperialism and white supremacy—this masterful biographical graphic novel celebrates this enduring legend and his legacy, offering inspiration for our own troubled time.

Wings

Paul McCartney (author), Ted Widmer (editor)

This is the story, in their own words, of a band that came to define a generation. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap history of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, Wings recounts the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. With extraordinary recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer, Wings transports the reader to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Introduced with a heartfelt foreword by McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run contains 150 black-and-white and colour photographs, many previously unseen, as well as timelines, a gigography and a full discography, in an art form all its own.

Shouting Out Loud

Audrey Golden

Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians. Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats tells their astonishing story in three extraordinary lives. In The Raincoats' first life, they recorded three full-length albums now regarded as classics and were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. Nearly a decade later in 1992, the band's second life took off when Kurt Cobain's love of the band catalysed their renaissance. Featuring exclusive interviews and never-before-seen images from The Raincoats' archive, Shouting Out Loud is the ultimate, authorised biography of this pioneering group of women - and the must-have account of a legendary band that holds a vital place in twentieth and twenty-first century sonic history.

Oasis: Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere

Jill Furmanovsky

Jill Furmanovsky’s unparalleled work with Oasis stretches from the end of 1994 – when the band’s debut album, Definitely Maybe, became the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history at the time – to their last tense shows in 2009, which culminated in their split. Jill was given unprecedented access to countless worldwide performances and many recording sessions. In this beautiful volume, overseen and edited by Noel Gallagher, award-winner Furmanovsky presents classic highlights and unseen images from her complete Oasis archive, which she describes as her best body of work, as well as insightful observations taken from notes she made at the time. Accompanying the images is illuminating commentary by Noel Gallagher, who relates the inside stories of the events pictured in many of the shoots and demonstrates an honest and touching relationship between band and photographer. Three essays by music journalists provide context to the band’s story, and an introduction by Jill celebrates the supreme significance of Oasis in her 50+ years photographing musicians.

Surf's Up

Peter Doggett

If any man in pop history deserved the tag of genius, it was Brian Wilson. As leader, producer and chief composer of the Beach Boys, he displayed an instinctive command of melody, harmony and arranging skills. The result was a run of hits that included many of the most sparkling and creative records of the 1960s. But there was a dark side to this seemingly effortless success, rooted in his tortured family background. No sooner had Brian masterminded such gems as the Pet Sounds album and 'Good Vibrations' than his psychological demons began to derail his life. Surf’s Up sees lifelong Beach Boys fan Peter Doggett capture all the glory and pain of this complex family saga. He celebrates the band’s array of musical gems, and also explores many of their passionate obsessions , from surfing and cars to politics and food.

Old Songs

Amy Jeffs (author), Gwen Burns (author)

Old Songs fuses short stories, histories, lyrics and illustrations in an enthralling reimagining of traditional folk ballads. Sunday Times Bestselling historian Amy Jeffs and Illustrator Gwen Burns combine forces to create a rich compendium, singing of travel, mystery, magic and the essential urges of humanity. Featuring iterations of fairy tales and sinister descendants of Greek myths and bible stories, as well as a cast of lesser-known characters with names like Tam Lim, Child Wynd and Maisery, Old Songs threads a tapestry of Britain's landscape, history and cultures. At the base of hills we can visit to this day, elf queens kidnap hapless poets and carry them through rivers of blood; and at the foot of a tree whose offspring still stand in the forests of Northumberland, a girl mimes combing the hairless head of a dragon who was once her brother. Bringing enchantment to familiar landscapes, ballads were created anew by each singer and passed down from fireside to fireside, at the knees of childhood nurses, in manuscripts and in early printed pamphlets. Now, ten stories are gathered here, beautifully recreated and illustrated for modern readers.

John and Paul

Ian Leslie

John & Paul begins in 1957, when two teenagers in suburban Liverpool meet and decide to play rock n'roll together. It ends twenty-three years later, when one of them is murdered. In between, we see them become global stars, create countless indelible songs, and play a central role in creating the modern world. Lennon and McCartney were more than friends, rivals or collaborators. They were intimates who both had the fabric of their world ruptured at a young age, and who longed to make emotional connections; with each other, and with audiences. The pop song was a vessel into which they poured feelings of grief and euphoria and everything in between. When they couldn't speak what they felt, they sang it. After the break-up of their group, they maintained a musical dialogue at a distance, in songs full of recrimination, regret, and affection. Leslie's majestic and wildly enjoyable biography will make us see and hear Lennon and McCartney anew.