Popular music

Test your pop music knowledge with the official PopMaster quiz book based on Ken Bruce's legendary radio and TV quiz show covering songs and artists in the UK music chart from the 1950s through to the present day.

Stephen Morris has had a distinguished career, spanning nearly 40 years, as a pivotal member of Joy Division and New Order with his trademark machine-like drumming. After the death of Joy Division's singer, Ian Curtis, in 1980, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Morris and his wife Gillian formed New Or...

Chris Frantz met David Byrne at the Rhode Island School of Art & Design in the early 1970s. Together - and soon with Frantz's future wife, Tina Weymouth - they formed Talking Heads and took up residence in the grimy environs of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where their neighbours were Patti Smith,...

Sinead O'Connor's voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television. O'Connor was unapologetic and impos...

Sinead O'Connor's voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television. O'Connor was unapologetic and impos...

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds argues that we have indeed reached a tipping...

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In 'Rock Concert', acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, w...

Punk has been romanticised and embalmed on TV, in books and on the catwalk. Punk's idols were the Sex Pistols, and Johnny Rotten its sneering antichrist. 17 year later, John Lyndon (aka Rotten) looks back at himself, the Pistols, and the 'no future' disaffection of their time.

Rob Deering has been listening to music his whole life, but it was only in his mid-thirties that - much to his surprise - he found himself falling in love with the hugely popular, nearly perfect, sometimes preposterous activity of running. In this vividly conjured collection, Rob shares stories o...

Comprising 50 chapters or 'visions', 'Running Up That Hill' is a multi-faceted biography of this famously elusive figure, viewing her life and work from fresh and illuminating angles. Featuring details from the author's one-to-one conversations with Kate, as well as vignettes of her key songs, al...