What's New | 11 January 2008

Happy New Year everybody!

First up, two exciting new titles for early 2008.

Coming Soon:

Bowie In Berlin tells the fascinating story of the three years David Bowie spent in Germany in the mid 1970s, making the most extraordinary music of his career.

Driven to the brink of madness by cocaine, overwork, marital strife, and a paranoid obsession with the occult, Bowie fled Los Angeles in 1975 and ended up in Berlin, the divided city on the frontline between communist East and capitalist West. There he sought anonymity, taking an apartment in a run-down district with his sometime collaborator Iggy Pop, another refugee from drugs and debauchery, while they explored the city and its notorious nightlife.

In this intensely creative period, Bowie put together three classic albums: Low, "Heroes", and Lodger (with collaborators who included Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Tony Visconti). He also found time to produce two albums for Iggy Pop (The Idiot and Lust For Life) and to take a leading role in a movie, the ill-starred Just A Gigolo.

This book tells the story of that period and those records, exploring Bowie's fascination with the city, unearthing his sources of inspiration, detailing his working methods, and teasing out the elusive meanings of the songs. Painstakingly researched and vividly written, the book casts new light on the most creative and influential era in David Bowie's career.

Beatles For Sale is a brand new way of looking at a story you may think you know inside out. Author John Blaney shows for the first time how the group and their inner circle invented so much of what we now recognise as the modern business of making and selling rock music. This was certainly not because Lennon, McCartney, Epstein, and the rest had a clear vision of the way things ought to be. Very often it was simply down to making things up as they went along (because no one had been there before and no one knew how to do these things). The book details the ups and downs of the group as they promoted, advertised, and sold records, played concerts, sold merchandise, made films, and set up publishing and record companies of their own. It is a story of naivety and greed, inexperience and luck, gullibility and ingenuity. It is the story of every aspect of how The Beatles made money (and how virtually every group since then has followed in their footsteps).


We have recently opened a Youtube page where you can view extracts from the wonderful DVDs that accompany our Interactive Series (the samples are from Totally Interactive Band Bible, Interactive Fender Bible and Totally Interactive Guitar Bible). Please check out the videos and leave comments as we're always eager to hear what you think.

For starters, here are Dave Hunter and XTC's Dave Gregory discussing and playing some shimmering Rickenbackers.



Jawbone on Youtube

Finally, we've had many correct answers in for our Four Decades Of Folk Rock competition... and we only have one copy left. Answer the question in the below blog and it could be yours.