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The bass player in the tartan-clad pop sensation from Edinburgh, Alan Longmuir was the first to tire of the endless touring and screaming teenagers and leave the band. His biography describes how the Rollers got to the top and gives his views on the acrimonious bust-ups and financial wranglings that followed.

One of three brothers and a cousin who formed The Beach Boys in the early 1960s, Brian Wilson emerged as the leading creative force of the group. This autobiography explores the influences that nurtured his talent and the productive years of creativity, before his struggles with mental illness and drugs began, as well as his rehabilitation since the 1990s and the completion of his legendary abandoned album, Smile. Slightly off-mint.

Born in 1947, Wilko Johnson read English at university, hit the hippie trail to Afghanistan and taught Shakespeare in a secondary school before becoming Dr Feelgood’s mesmerizing guitarist in the 1970s. His candid and often funny memoir tells his story from first love in Canvey Island, through rock stardom, to not dying with cancer.

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First published in 1946, the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s account of his survival in the Warsaw Ghetto inspired an Oscar-winning film. Reprinted with diary extracts by the German officer who saved him, it offers a picture of the claustrophobia and terror of ghetto life.

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David Matthews, the fellow-composer who worked for several years as Benjamin Britten’s assistant, combines an account of the great musician’s life with comments on works ranging from Peter Grimes and the War Requiem to pieces written while their composer was still at school. Revised edition.

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Founder and lead guitarist of the Sex Pistols, Steve Jones has a good claim to be one of the most influential figures in rock history. His autobiography reveals how he went from petty crime in West London to pop stardom, and most recently, radio host.

From street poet in 1962 to international celebrity performing an evening of nostalgie at the Palais de Congrès in Paris, 2009, this volume covers Bob Dylan’s career in 34 interviews, including conversations with Rolling Stone journalists, with Robert Shelton during the documentary No Direction Home, with Sam Shepard for Esquire and with many others who braved Dylan’s warning, ‘Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’/I might just tell you the truth’.

Growing up in a humble shack in America’s poorest state, Elvis Presley dreamed that success would free him from poverty. So how did he become dependent on bank loans even after achieving huge worldwide fame, and why did he despise his own movies and songs, even fearing that he would be forgotten after his death? This biography focuses on identifying the origins of the contradictions and frailties that lay behind Elvis’s charming, confident onstage persona. Slightly off-mint.

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Keith Richards claims he wrote '(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction' in his sleep, only discovering the now-familiar riff when he listened to a cassette tape that had been accidentally left running. The writing and recording of all 340 of the Stones’ tracks are explored in this compendium, which is illustrated with contemporary photographs of the band, their gear, and other musicians and people associated with the recordings. Off-mint.

In 1982 Michael Jackson made a demo of a song called Starlight for his new album but it was judged inadequate until a new lyric transformed it into Thriller, his career-defining recording. This highly illustrated book tells the story of all Jackson’s songs from the first hits of the Jackson 5 to songs released since the singer’s death in 2009, and includes profiles of key producers and collaborators. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge

An enforcer of a manager, a private Boeing 707, drugs, booze, sex and Satanism are all part of the tale of rock success and personal excess in Stephen Davis's classic biography of Led Zeppelin.

During the last decade of his life Leoš Janá?ek sent hundreds of passionate letters to Kamila Stösslová, a married woman half his age. Selections from their correspondence are translated in this volume, with linking commentary, photographs and a decoding of the lovers’ erotic references. Their words reveal how much this relationship inspired the composer’s final, greatest works – including the String Quartet ‘Intimate Letters’ – and shed valuable light on his personality.

A prototype tragic hero for the rock generation to follow, Hank Williams struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse and died before he was 30 on New Year's Day, 1953. This new biography of the country legend describes his childhood of rural poverty, tracing his musical roots to the street corner bluesman he befriended in Alabama, and explores the powerful influence in his life and career of his domineering mother, Millie, and fiery wife, Audrey. Off-mint.

Édith Piaf (1915–1963) began her singing career on the streets of Pigalle in 1929; at her death in 1963, she had become an icon of French chanson. In this study, Looseley examines ‘the cultural phenomenon known as Édith Piaf’ and argues that it was a deliberate invention.

On hearing a starling whistling his latest concerto in a Vienna shop, Mozart was so enchanted that he bought the bird as a family pet. Haupt interweaves the story of the composer’s songbird with her own experiences as a naturalist caring for a rescued nestling.

Tom Wiggins (1849–1908) was born a slave; blind and probably autistic, he soon displayed a remarkable memory for sound. This biography traces his career as an international piano virtuoso and shows how attitudes to celebrity, race and disability intersected in the response to his skills. Slightly off-mint.

Presented in scrapbook format with archive photographs, memorabilia and quotations from contemporary musicians, this history of the Ramones assesses the band's entire career, musical output and cultural impact, and includes a foreword by CJ Ramone.

Adding ticket stubs, posters and other period ephemera to a collection of archive photographs, this celebration of the Rolling Stones chronicles their rise from the London blues scene of the early 1960s to world fame and profiles each of the band members. Organized around their 22 album releases, each chapter discusses the progress of their recording and live career as well as telling the story of each of the songs.

This review of Bowie's output during the 1970s tells the stories behind the writing and recording of all his songs of the period, including the Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Scary Monsters albums.

The celebrated photographer Brian Duffy collaborated with David Bowie during the 1970s, helping to create his highly influential album artwork. The images in this catalogue, which was inspired by the V&A’s ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition, are supported by the recollections of people who worked on the shoots.

Perhaps the most aggressive expression of the pop culture of the 1960s, The Who were powerful exponents of early British rock and their reputation as an unrivalled live act kept audiences flocking to their concerts well into the 21st century. This photographic portfolio presents many previously unpublished images of the group from early promotional portraits and London pub gigs of the mid 1960s to their Live 8 performance of 2005. Felt-tip mark on the upper trimmed edge.

Lead singer and lyricist on many of the Beach Boys' biggest hits, Mike Love has often been blamed for the quarrels that divided the group. In this autobiography he offers his side of the story. Off-mint with felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

Otis Redding (1941–1967) made a seismic impact on American popular culture, and his recordings for the STAX label during the 1960s helped to define the sound of soul music and bring it to the mainstream. Based on interviews and extensive archival research, this chronicle of his life traces his rise from an unknown rural gospel singer to a superstar capable of selling out huge venues across the world. American-cut pages.

This illustrated memoir celebrates the friendship and innovative collaboration between David Bowie and the artist Edward Bell. It explains how they met, describes Bowie’s involvement in the creative process and explores the unique qualities that made him a cultural icon.

This exploration of the meaning of and inspiration for every track in Led Zeppelin’s ten-album canon charts the band’s movements during their decade at the top and recounts the circumstances of the writing and recording of each of their celebrated tracks.

Written to mark Beethoven’s centenary, this long essay forms the principal aesthetic statement of Wagner’s later years and influenced the young Nietzsche. Allen’s new English translation faces the German original; his introduction places the essay within its historical, political and philosophical contexts.

One of the first internationally famous conductors, Richter (1843–1916) premiered works by Wagner, Brahms and Elgar. Fifield’s detailed biography draws on the letters and diaries of Richter and other prominent musicians; this expanded edition also features his complete ‘conducting books’ documenting 4,351 public performances. (Previously published as True Artist and True Friend.)

Jerry Dantzic was commissioned to photograph Billie Holiday during a week-long engagement at Sugar Hill jazz club in Newark, New Jersey, in 1957. Allowed into her inner circle, Dantzic was able to capture intimate moments backstage and at the singer's Manhattan apartment, as well as atmospheric shots of her performances. The 100 images in this portfolio present a poignant portrait of the troubled star two years before her death at the age of 44.

Beethoven’s compositional sketchbooks preserve his incipient and laconic ideas for many symphonic movements, some of which grew into the nine completed works. Presenting a movement-by-movement analysis, Professor Lockwood uses evidence from these documents to trace the symphonies’ historical, biographical and creative origins. He reveals how they evolved slowly in Beethoven’s mind – the earliest ideas for the Fifth and Sixth appear with sketches for the Third – and how they relate to major compositions in other genres.

For centuries female composers have been unjustly ignored and patronized, since they worked within a male-dominated musical culture that sought to exclude them, even to the extent of questioning their music’s authorship. The eight composers profiled here all challenged this prejudice with courage and pragmatism, from Francesca Caccini, who manipulated the gender politics of the Medici court, to Vaughan Williams’ pupil Elizabeth Maconchy, who fought back against sexism by working with ‘rigid self-discipline’.

Celebrated now as a composer, Gustav Mahler was best known to his contemporaries as a conductor. This meticulously researched volume documents more than 320 concerts in which he participated as conductor or pianist, and briefly surveys his 2,025 opera performances.

Dave Stewart’s career as songwriter, performer and producer has spanned four decades. In this memoir he shares the stories behind his creative partnerships with a host of musicians and his rise to global stardom with Annie Lennox as Eurythmics. Foreword by Mick Jagger. Off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Elvis's career began to take off in 1955 when he was picked up by the shady Dutch-born promoter ’Colonel' Tom Parker, who secured a major recording deal. The contract sent to Elvis's parents (as the singer's guardians) to authorize Parker as manager is one of the items of memorabilia reproduced in this celebration of Elvis's career, which includes many concert and promotional photographs, film stills and posters as well as private snaps and personal documents.

When Barbra Streisand began to make her mark on Broadway in the early 1960s, her unusual and striking looks were as notable as her singing and acting. Beginning with studio portraits made when she was only 18, this portfolio collects some of the finest images of the star throughout her whole career, including stills from iconic stage and film productions and commissioned portraits by leading photographers including Bob Willoughby, Cecil Beaton and Philippe Halsman.

‘Even in his own lifetime Handel passed from being an individual to an institution’: in this acclaimed biography the conductor Christopher Hogwood assembles documentary evidence to take us back to the original Handel. After tracing the composer’s career from his early years in Germany to fame as an opera composer in London, Hogwood ends the book by surveying the posthumous development of the Handel legend. This revised edition features a new afterword that provides analysis of recent advances in Handelian scholarship. (First published in 1984.)

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) was a composer and performer of operas, keyboard works and chamber music, but also a sophisticated theorist and teacher. This reference work, by a leading authority on French Baroque music, reflects the full range of those activities. The book begins with a short biography drawing attention to significant patterns in his life and work; the rest of the volume forms a Rameau ‘dictionary’ with entries on people, places, instruments and institutions as well as the composer’s own works.

The 'Mighty Handful' of five Russian composers who came together in St Petersburg in the 1860s had little musical education, but they created some of the most popular music in the classical repertoire, including Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade. Walsh's study analyses how this rare example of a creative musical collective worked and reveals the crucial role played by their mentor, the art historian Vladimir Stasov, in fostering a Russian nationalist music. Slightly off-mint and American-cut pages.

An empire was dying, but the band played on, reeling out one intoxicating waltz after another: Voices of Spring, Tales from the Vienna Woods, The Blue Danube… This absorbing narrative tells the story of the two Waltz Kings, Johann Strauss father and son, whose melodies beguiled Europe even as the family was riven with tension, jealousy and feuds, mirroring the dysfunction of the Austrian Empire as it danced and drank its way to catastrophe.

Now best remembered as the conductor of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, Sir Hamilton Harty (1879–1941) began his career in Ulster and Dublin before coming to prominence in London as a piano accompanist. This biography reveals how he was influenced by these early experiences, analyses the debates he provoked on such topics as jazz and modernism and emphasizes his parallel career as a composer of orchestral works, chamber music and songs. The book ends with complete lists of Harty’s recordings and compositions.

A household name since his prodigious childhood, the violinist and conductor Sir Yehudi Menuhin (1916–99) strove to use his fame to draw attention to many humanitarian issues. Humphrey Burton, who knew Menuhin for 40 years, compiled this biography with full access to his subject’s personal archive; it offers a rounded portrait of his family life and his wide-ranging activities as performer, teacher and ‘musical diplomat’. The preface to this centenary edition highlights Menuhin’s continuing legacy.

Philip Norman's history of the Beatles, Shout!, and his biography of John Lennon seemed to take a largely anti-McCartney stance so it was a surprise when Paul gave tacit approval to Norman to write this biography, enabling access to family members and close friends. The result redresses the balance, describing the importance of McCartney's creative leadership in the Beatles and exploring his later career and personal life from the early death of his mother to his highly publicized marriages. Felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

One of the most significant figures in American popular music, Hank Williams (1923–1953) rose to fame in the late 1940s, but alcohol and drug abuse made him difficult to work with and contributed to his untimely death. This definitive biography, updated with new information about the singer that has emerged in recent years, forms the basis of the 2015 film of the same title.

For more than half a century, Mary O’Hara’s voice has delighted audiences across the globe. In this warm and inspiring autobiography, she recalls her childhood in the west of Ireland, the tragic death of her first husband, and her retreat to a nunnery before re-emerging to restart her career to even greater acclaim. Enriched with humorous anecdotes of life on the road, it also recounts her later years as a charity worker with her second husband in Africa.

Born in New Jersey in 1915, Frank Sinatra began singing with various dance bands from the 1930s and in a six-decade career became one of the most influential musical artists of the 20th century as well as an Oscar-winning actor. Marking the centenary of his birth, this large-format celebration draws on the Sinatra family archive to present unseen photographs and ephemera from his life, and includes contributions from Tony Bennett and Sinatra’s children: Nancy, Tina and Frank Jr.

The second of a two-volume work that examines Olivier Messiaen’s interconnections with his cultural milieux, this collection of 14 essays analyses his compositional approach and the repercussions of his music and includes Robert Fallon’s Catalogue of Messiaen’s Birds.

Growing up in a humble shack in America’s poorest state, Elvis Presley dreamed that success would free him from poverty. So how did he become dependent on bank loans even after achieving huge worldwide fame, and why did he despise his own movies and songs, even fearing that he would be forgotten after his death? This biography focuses on identifying the origins of the contradictions and frailties that lay behind Elvis’s charming, confident onstage persona.

This collection of letters to and from the harpsichordist, scholar and early music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick spans his career, from Paris in the 1930s to the 1980s, and includes a selection of family letters as well as correspondence with composers and colleagues.

Anton Heiller (1923-1979) was a remarkable organist whose interpretations changed the way Bach's music is played. He was also a conductor, composer and professor of organ in Vienna; this study covers every facet of his career. Translated by Christa Rumsey.

Dame Vera Lynn (b. 1917) was 92 when she decided to 'get everything down on paper in a final account'. Here is her story of 'an ordinary girl’ who became the iconic ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ of the Second World War.

Revealing how Arturo Toscanini came to conduct and record so frequently in London, Dyment’s study covers performances from the 1930s to the conductor’s final concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 1952.

Before Abba launched their international career at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, all four group members were already stars in their own right in Sweden. Documenting their phenomenal subsequent career as well as their lives before and after the formation of the supergroup, and including the Mamma Mia musical, this authorized photo book contains more than 600 images of the band and contains the personal comments of Benny, Björn, Frida and Agnetha on many of the pictures.

In case studies on the 'inspirations' of five composers - Wagner, Mahler, Furtwangler, Richard Strauss and Berg - Walton examines how their tales of epiphanies played a determining role in certain of their works.

This study examines biographical fictions – or fictional biographies – about Wagner in Venice and his death there, discussing works by 14 writers, including Vernon Lee, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Thomas Mann and Ray Furness. No jacket.

The lyrics penned by Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) contributed to the success of some of Broadway's best-known shows, such as Brigadoon, Camelot and My Fair Lady. This collection of witty letters offers insights into his creative process and the highs and lows of a four-decade career, as he negotiates with a host of famous correspondents - composers (Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber), producers (Herman Levin, Frederick Brisson) and stars of stage and screen (Katharine Hepburn, Dirk Bogarde).