A celebration of the farewell tour, full of glittering images - including many from the archives - of Elton sporting some of the most outrageous garments ever conceived.
For old rockers and die-hards who simply refuse to gather moss... and, no doubt, for hipsters: an illustrated history of contemporary culture, through the prism of Rolling Stone magazine's c... read more
Morris made his name as a photographer of the reggae and punk scenes of the 1970s: Bob Marley, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the Sex Pistols, Jimmy Cliff, Patti Smith and many others.
The latest in Yale's Musical Instrument series winds from ancient animal horns to the lurs of Bronze Age Denmark - and thence eventually to its modern brassy descendants.
"I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb - and I'm not blonde either." Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, actress, author, business... read more
The role of surrealism and the cultural milieu of Paris in the 1940s helped inspire Boulez's emotional and radical music. CP's last book - on Eric Satie - was excellent.
Wolf set the works of thirty-six poets to music. Here the genial professor of lieder at the Royal College of Music translates the poems, introduces the poets and Wolf's connections with them... read more
The 1970s NME critic got bored with pop and discovered that the most radical music of all was classical. This is a personal and entertainingly idiosyncratic history of music.
Published by Yale, this is a fascinating and original exploration of the influence of the newly popular guitar on the Romantics and on culture in the early C19th.
A massive work tracing Wagner's immense influence, not only through his adoption by the Nazis but through a gallery of others, from Baudelaire and Woolf to Philip K Dick and 'Apocalypse Now'... read more
A companion volume to his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (pbk £25), tracing Bach's evolution as a composer and looking deeply into his creative process.
It's only six years since his magisterial biography of Beethoven, which seemed a lifetime's work. To do the same so quickly for Mozart seems nothing short of miraculous. NB due for publicati... read more
Shinichi Suzuki was a violinist who became more famous as an educator and philosopher; his ideas of language acquisition revolutionised musical training. He also did much to erode occidental... read more
DJ takes on another Big Year, this time the one that produced Horses, Blood on the Tracks and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. His book on '95, Faster than a Cannonball, was a riot.
How do you write music to serve the socialist state? Yet that is what a generation of Russian composers had to do. Some produced superb music; many more suffered terribly in the Gulag.
From childhood to the 1970s and her marriage to Sonny - therefore doesn't include her account of a surprising publicity stunt in 1979 (?) when she appeared at a boys school not unknown to li... read more
A memoir by the Swedish singer-songwriter who found her voice with Poly Styrene and Viv Albertine, later working with Massive Attack and others in her long career in music.
Besides delving into Beethoven's story, Suchet relates his experience of the music to aspects of his own life as a foreign correspondent. The result is an affecting testament to a lifelong e... read more
The upheavals of 1930s' Germany created a cultural diaspora as composers and musicians fled abroad: Kurt Weill, Korngold and many lesser-known artists too.
Mozart was taken to Italy three times by his father in his early and mid-teens; already astonishingly accomplished as a thirteen-year-old, he drank in Italian opera like a thirsty man findin... read more
The first biography of one of the great codebreakers: she played a key role in both world wars, and also deciphered the letters of both Beethoven and Mozart.
A short biography of Thomas Linley, the Georgian prodigy who was celebrated - with Mozart - by Burney as "the most promising geniusses of the age". But he died very young.