The Clash: The Music That Matters
Tony Fletcher

Rights now sold: Italy, UK

The ultimate book on recordings made by The Clash.

An album by album, track by track examination of every song released by The Clash, from their first single 'White Riot' to Combat Rock and beyond. Includes sections on compilations, live recordings, films, and post-Clash work by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.

Features include:

A chronology of key events in the story of the Clash

An album by album, track by track analysis

Details of reissues and the state of the current Clash catalogue 

16 pages of pictures 

Tony Fletcher is the author of biographies on Keith Moon, R.E.M. and Echo & The Bunnymen, All Hopped Up And Ready To Go, a history of New York’s music scene, and of the novel Hedonism. He hosts the website www.ijamming.net. (He first saw The Clash in a London park in 1978.)

Omnibus Press, February 2012, OP54417, colour & b/w photos, 

NIRVANA: THE RECORDING SESSIONS
ROB JOVANOVIC
Rights now sold:  Italy (second edition) UK

A Where, Why, Who and What guide to Nirvana’s recordings.

This book was first published as a hardback at £20.00 by Helter Skelter imprint Firefly in late 2004, but Soundcheck Books is proud to be paperbacking it, taking it to a wider audience. Whilst it did well in the UK on publication it never reprinted or sold outside Europe as a year later Helter Skelter MD Sean Body was sadly diagnosed with the leukaemia that was to take his life.

Oddly, despite never being published in America, the book still won an ARSC Certificate of Excellence for rock research.  It is a work for Nirvana fans only (and there are many of them, the band has over 11 million Facebook likes, compared to a ‘mere’ 7 million for the Rolling Stones) as it covers the minutiae of every recording session they did right from the first demos  recorded in Kurt Cobain’s bedroom as far back as December 1982.

Please note, this is not a cut and paste book centred around their discography. The author interviewed people who were intimately connected with the sessions including producers, so the reader gets fascinating glimpses into how the records were made, and how various sounds were created. Jovanovic also contextualises everything  looking at how each album came about and what shape the band (and articularly Cobain) were in at the time. ‘Painstaking’ is the word that springs to mind when one reads this labour of love.

This new edition is fully revised and updated.

Rob Jovanovic is a well-respected full-time music writer having published books on Beck,  R.E.M., Velvet Underground amongst others and worked with publishers as diverse as Orion, Aurum and Piatkus. He has also written a book on football cards and stickers for Orion, and as a Nottingham Forest fan residing in the city he lives life in a state of perpetual disappointment.

Published: 30th April 2012

ISBN: 9780956642066

Price: £14.99 paperback

New edition fully revised and updated

Includes integral b/w photos

Butterfly on a Wheel

The Great Rolling Stones Drugs Bust

Simon Wells

Rights now sold: Brazil, Portugal, France, UK

 

 

Creativity and narcotic use have been intertwined for centuries, but during the mid-sixties a series of events in Britain raised the issue of drugs in the pop world to new and greater heights. Without doubt, the most famous of these cases was the trial and subsequent jailing in 1967 of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones...

The case was the cause celebre of its era, raising issues of far greater significance than the simple possession of a bit of pot and a few pep pills. For several months it seemed that the entire establishment of Great Britain had taken up arms against the young, as represented by the singer and guitarist in the second most popular pop group in the land...

The saga dominated popular opinion throughout 1967, prompting a fierce public debate over drug use and the laws that were meant to regulate it. Furthermore, it revived the old chestnut of the special responsibility that entertainers supposedly have with regard to the example they set to their audience. For the generation that remembered the war and stood to attention when the National Anthem was played in cinemas, the realisation that the nation’s youth preferred pop stars as role models instead of army generals and navy admirals was deeply unsettling..

By late 1966, talk of drug use by the nation’s musicians was far too tempting to ignore. The News Of The World’s decision to blow the lid off this private party kick-started a series of events that led to a global reassessment of recreational drug use. The paper’s series of articles, starting at the beginning of 1967, became one of the most famous exposés of celebrity behaviour of the 20th century. Headlined ‘Pop Stars and Drugs – Facts That Will Shock You’, the tabloid revealed the drug habits of unsuspecting musicians that had until then been kept strictly behind closed doors...

As a result of the paper’s erroneous exposé of Jagger, a chain of events was set in motion that resulted in 18 police officers raiding Keith Richards’ country home in Sussex on the evening of February 12. It was the first notable strike against pop’s non-conformists, and while it was abundantly clear that the information fed to police came from the News Of The World, others believed there was a wider collusion, that this raid was an unequivocal directive from an establishment determined to pummel the Stones for their decadent behaviour and the example they were setting to the nation’s youth...

The shock waves from the raid sent a wave of fear through British pop’s tight-knit community. As tales of an undercover agent infiltrating the guest lists gathered momentum, London’s party circle tightened and doors closed in the faces of the uninvited...

With fingers pointing, a Kray Twins associate charged with determining who had tipped off the police brutally confronted one of the Redlands’ attendees. Elsewhere, another shady character from the Stones’ circle attempted to bribe a policeman to interfere with incriminating evidence. With these and other – more legitimate – acts being undertaken, it was obvious that every effort was being made to prevent the Rolling Stones from standing in the dock...

 

Broadsheets hitherto uninterested in pop published thoughtful editorials on a saga fast enveloping the entire country. When their role in the story became known, the offices of the News Of The World were picketed for three nights in retaliation at what was evidently a stitch-up...

The most erudite opponent of the jail sentences was The Times newspaper. On July 1, its then editor, William Rees-Mogg, wrote one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and impassioned editorials, challenging what he saw as exemplary treatment, likening Mick Jagger’s fate to that of “breaking a butterfly on a wheel”, a line borrowed from Alexander Pope’s 1735 poem, Epistle To Dr Arbuthnot...

  --extracts from the intro, Simon Wells

 

Simon Wells has written about film and music for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and The Times. The author of The Beatles: 365 Days and Your Face Here, he lives in Sussex, England.

  UK:  Omnibus Press

OP54043  352pp  234x156mm  b/w photos  softcover  £14.95

Promo video by Peter Whitehead

The Story of Crass
George Berger

Rights now sold: Poland, USA, Italy, Germany, Japan, France

Crass was the anarcho-punk face of a revolutionary movement founded by radical thinkers Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant.  When punk ruled the waves, Crass waived the rules and took it further, putting out their own records, films and magazines and setting up a series of situationist pranks that were dutifully covered by the world's press. Not just another iconoclastic band, Crass was a musical, social and political phenomenon.

Commune-dwellers who were rarely photographed and remained contemptuous of conventional pop stardom, their members exhausted the possibilities of punk-led anarchy. They have at last collaborated on telling the whole Crass story, giving access to many never-before seen photos and interviews.

The author has written for Sounds, Melody Maker and Amnesty International amongst others. His previous book was a biography of the Levellers: State Education/No University.
 
Catalogue: OP51447

UK Publisher: Omnibus Press, London