Aurum – serie

Over 50 years since the release of their first studio album, Pink Floyd’s extraordinary style of music and aesthetic continues to amaze and inspire listeners of all generations. In this superbly comprehensive and engrossing history of the group, Mark Blake tells how this group of Cambridge school friends went on the conquer the world with iconic albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, and put on some of the most spectacular shows of all time. Drawing on over a hundred original interviews, Pigs Might Fly follows Pink Floyd from the early psychedelic nights at UFO in the mid-sixties through to the acrimonious schism that ended the band by the nineties. Now with a revised chapter to bring the story up to date and published to coincide with The V&A exhibition in 2017, Pigs Might Fly has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Pink Floyd.

‘ An extraordinary history… The range of voices breathing new life into past events is vast’ **** Mojo ‘ The Morrissey and Marr recollections are particularly revealing’ The WordThe Buzzcocks. Joy Division. The Fall. The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy Mondays. Oasis. Manchester has proved to be an endlessly rich seam of pop-music talent over the last 30 years. Highly opinionated and usually controversial, stars such as Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, Ian Brown and the Gallagher brothers have always had plenty to say for themselves. Here, in John Robb’ s new compilation, Manchester’ s gobbiest musicians tell the story of the city’ s thriving music scene in their own words.When the Buzzcocks put on the Sex Pistols at Lester Free Hall in 1976, they kickstarted a musical revolution and a fervent punk scene exploded. In 1979 the legendary Tony Wilson founded Factory Records, the home of Joy Division/New Order and later the Happy Mondays. The Hacienda, the Factory nightclub, became notorious in the late 1980s as a centre of the influential Madchester scene, led by the Mondays and the Stone Roses, with a unique style and sound of its own. Then, from the ashes of Madchester rose ü ber-lads Oasis, the kings of Britpop and the biggest UK band of the 1990s.John Robb is a leading music journalist and the author of the bestselling biography of the Stone Roses. His other books include Punk: An Oral History, The Charlatans … We Are Rock and The Nineties: What the F**k Was That All About? He lives in Manchester.

Fred Trueman was so much more than a cricketing legend. ‘ The greatest living Yorkshireman’ according to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, he couldn’ t help excelling at everything he did, whether it was as a hostile fast bowler for Yorkshire and England, and the first man to take 300 Test wickets in a career, or as a fearlessly outspoken radio summariser for Test Match Special. He was famous for regularly spluttering that, ‘ I don’ t know what’ s going off out there,’ as well as for the amount of swearing he managed to incorporate into everyday speech. Beloved of cricket crowds, who filled grounds to witness his belligerent way of playing the game, and nothing but trouble to the cricket authorities, ‘ Fiery Fred’ was the epitome of a full-blooded Englishman.But as Chris Waters reveals in this first full biography, behind the charismatic, exuberant mask lay a far less self-assured man – terrified even that his new dog wouldn’ t like him – and whose bucolic version of his upbringing bore no relation to the gritty and impoverished South Yorkshire mining community where he actually grew up. Drawing on dozens of new interviews with his Yorkshire colleagues, family and friends, this life of Fred Trueman will surprise and even shock, but also confirm the status of an English folk hero.