Back catalogue: All genres

Notes: This deluxe hard-back book features hundreds of stunning full size record cover designs of Bossa Nova and Brazilian music from the 1960s. The book also comes complete with full accompanying text, essays and interviews on the historical, political and social context of this Brazilian music as well as features on all the important artists and musicians of the era such as Sergio Mendes, Tom Jobim, Jorge Ben, Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso and many more.

Bossa Nova, born in Rio de Janeiro, became a worldwide musical phenomenon, quickly spreading to the USA and the rest of the world. Subsequent musical styles such as the rise of MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) and Tropicalia are also featured in the book. Bossa Nova emerged at the end of the 1950s, the music (and glorious designs) reflecting a new period of great optimism in the country. Brazil had just elected a new president, a new five-year plan for prosperity had been laid down and the architect Oscar Niemeyer had drawn up his plans for the city of Brasilia. By 1964, as Bossa Nova was taking the world by storm, tanks rode through Rio as Brazil came under a violent military dictatorship that would oppress the lives of Brazilians for the next twenty years.

Notes: An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together portraits and interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that Dummy engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is it that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade - and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

Notes: It's been 60 years since the little record with the big hole first arrived on the scene, changing the sound of music forever; and while these black gems have been around for a long time 45s are still red hot in the collecting market.

The Goldminer Price Guide to 45 RPM helps you stay in the loop and on the edge of the 45 RPM market with comprehensive coverage of the biggest little record ever made. In this one book you'll find updated pricing, a checklist format for easy inventorying and:

80,000 listings of 7" 45s, and EPs
Details on artists, labels, and variations
State-of-the-market report featuring an insider's look at hot trends
Three feature articles: 60 Years Of The 45: How It All Began, Why 45s Matter and The World's Rarest 45s
Bonus CD featuring: 20000 additional listings not included in the book, 1000 picture sleeves and label identification guide.

Notes: Christopher R Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a room like a rock band to create a not quite right tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and sirens.

Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.

Notes: The Royal Ruler & The Railway DJ is a double autobiography from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This is the story of the communist effect on the teenagers and musicians in Czechoslovakia, set against the remarkable career of Tony Prince, a DJ who rocked the boat, met Elvis Presley, sang with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, toured with the Osmonds and partied with Led Zeppelin. Tony became the only DJ to perform inside the iron curtain not long after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia which is where the authors first met.

This is the story of the daddy of all radio stations and the DJs who entertained an estimated 100 million trans-European listeners every night.

Whilst every kid across Europe listened to their transistor radios hidden beneath their pillows in fear of their parents, Jan Sestak listened in the knowledge that the Czechoslovak Secret Police who prowled his land would send him to prison if he were discovered. Their Gestapo predecessors imposed the death sentence on anyone caught listening to western radio stations.

There are two incredible sides to the Radio Luxembourg listening experience and you may be forgiven if you can hardly believe what you are about to read.

Here is the first book in the world to reveal what teenage life was like under Communism in the Eastern Bloc and what boundless fun it must have been like for the men behind the microphone.

- Hardback with dustcover; 590 pages with 16 pages of photography (black/white and colour).