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IMPORTANT NOTICE
All of our books are available in e-book format only. They require an Adobe Acrobat reader (free download available).
Book(s) will be e-mailed as .pdf file attachments within 24 hours (usually much less) of purchase. Books will be e-mailed to the e-mail address provided with your Pay Pal payment, from davethompsonbooks.com. Please adjust your spam filters accordingly.
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YOUR TICKET OUT OF HERE - THE ARMCHAIR GUIDE TO TV SMITH
e-book, 129 pages. PRICE $5
Slaby Witness, Sleaze, the Adverts, TV Smith's Explorers, Party Line, High, Production House, Cheap... the TV Smith story is one of rock's richest, filled with some of the most exhilarating music of the past 30 years. And Your Ticket Out Of Here is the first comprehensively detailed guide to every last note of it.
Well, maybe not the first. The original edition of this book was published back in 1984, within the final edition of the TV Times, the wonderfully chaotic TV Smith fanzine that I had spent the past four years producing at a rate of (almost) one a month. A second edition followed in 1990, sold through the pages of the British Punk Collector fanzine.
But this update completely revises those earlier editions, while adding a complete biography, reviews, and other information. It also revises the original (somewhat confusing) format, to align it with the series of other Armchair Guides that I published through Helter Skelter Publishing a few years ago (the Cure, New Order and the Fall), and which is now relaunching in e–book format.
There are some gaps, that mercifully can be filled by visiting TV's website (TVSmith.com). All the key information is here, however; the record releases, crucial/memorable live shows, and so forth, to continue a tradition that Mick Mercer, reviewing the TV Times in ZigZag, once proclaimed “a true labour of love,” trailing TV “from trench to toilet and back again.” |
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FOOTNOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES OF GENIUS
e-book – 166 pages. Price $5
When the Footnote Archives column launched in Goldmine, back in 1995, the brief was simple. Once a month, America’s premier record collecting magazine would devote one full page to artists who, in some cases, might not ever have made a record… or, if they did, it wasn’t anything many of our readers would have heard of.
Eleven years later, FOOTNOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES OF GENIUS rounds up 40 of the 130+ different columns that have run over the past 11 years… a second volume, currently in preparation, will feature as many again. Many have been revised, not only to take into account subsequent reissues, but also to note sadder events as well – there have been as many deaths as there have been comebacks, after all, and I can’t help but feel a pang of regret at the thought that the last article these performers may have read about their “glory” days was published beneath the banner Footnote Archives. For their career might be a footnote to us, the outsiders, but for them… it was their life.
THE A-JAES – ANTHYM - STEVE ASHLEY - ASHTON, GARDNER & DYKE – BABYLON ZOO – THE BEAT-HOVENS – THE BLUE MEANIES – PHILLIPPE DEBARGE – KEITH DE GROOT – JOHNNY DEVLIN – DOCTORS OF MADNESS – CARL DOUGLAS – FANCY - SHANE FENTON – GREEDY BASTARDS - LUTHER GROSVENOR - HEAVY METAL KIDS - JO JO GUNNE - JOHNNY KIDD – PAUL KING – LAST TOUCH - THE LEN BRIGHT COMBO - LONDON – LOST LOVED ONES - MASTERSWITCH - MEDICINE HEAD - MIKE PRATT – RODDY RADIATION - RAMASES - THE RAN-DELLS - ROOGALATOR - ROUNDABOUT - RUPERT & THE RED DEVILS – SEXAGISMA – SLIK – SPHYNX - STRING DRIVEN THING - MIKE TAYLOR – JOHNNY WARMAN
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BEAT BACK - THE ARMCHAIR GUIDE TO JOHN OTWAY & WILD WILLY BARRETT, 1971-1979
e-book, 99 pages. PRICE $5
The problem with this book, you’re probably thinking, is that it’s only half-complete. Both individually and collectively, John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett did indeed endure an eventful career through the 1970s, but they’ve enjoyed even more eventful ones since then, and are still on the top of their game (whatever that may be) today. Writing a book about Otway-Barrett that ends in 1979 is like… like… like writing a book about the Beatles that ends in 1963. Or would it? What if that book was actually written in 1979, at a time when true pop stardom still seemed to be in reach, and then abandoned, forgotten, tucked away in a folder, and only rediscovered by utter chance, when its author, close to 30 years older than when it was written, was looking for something else entirely?
That would be Beatback, a book that traces John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett from their earliest musical (or otherwise) strivings, through to the release of John's Where Did I Go Right? and Willy's Call Of The Wild... a time when "Cor Baby, That's Really Free" was still only 18 months old, and Any Moment Now, that great golden bird was going to swoop down and transport Otway, at least, to Las Vegas and beyond.
Today, we begrudgingly acknowledge that might not be so likely any more, and the Otway stories that are told today dwell on his career as an object lesson in how NOT to make it. Beatback was written, with John and Willy's full co-operation, before history was rewritten, and it emerges all the more incredible for it.
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SPACE DAZE – THE HISTORY AND MYSTERY OF AMBIENT ELECTRONIC SPACE ROCK
e-book – 107 pages. PRICE $5
OVER 100 PAGES OF BRAIN DAMAGE!
In the beginning, there was Hawkwind. Not quite in the very beginning, of course; sundry creation myths notwithstanding, nothing springs from absolutely nothing. In terms of Space Rock though, while, without Hawkwind, there would still have been Space and Rock and, maybe, some people would have put them together and said "ah, this must be what we mean,” Hawkwind was never simply "put together.” Neither, though adherents of what we today call Space Rock can argue all night about its ingredients, can they be removed from the equation. What, after all, is Space Rock? To the earliest Hawkwind fans, who saw the adverts in the music press that advertised their first, eponymous, album beneath - yes, beneath the banner SPACE ROCK, it encompassed everything from the blues-driven throb of "Hurry On Sundown,” to the spectral echoes of "Paranoia" (parts one and two, divisible only when you got up to change the record; on CD the break's just an irritant), and on to the full-blooded freak-out of "Seeing It As You Really Are,” ten minutes of eerie electronics - except the sounds are all organic, and what you hear whispering, howling and hooting in your head is not necessarily what you have going on in your ears. Space Rock embraced all these things; Space Rock thus became all these things, and it was only later, once other musicians had borrowed its elements, isolated them and developed them as single strands, that maybe the basics became a little blurred.
First published in 1996, but now expanded to encompass even more cerebral dislocation, SPACE DAZE is the story of Space Rock, from Pink Floyd to the Orb, from Hawkwind to Ozric Tentacles, from Amon Duul to ZZZ.
Plus… Daevid Allen, Syd Barrett, Tim Blake, the Edgar Broughton Band, Arthur Brown, Can, Robert Calvert, Chrome, the Deviants, Mick Farren, Faust, Edgar Froese, Gong, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Hillage, Kraftwerk, Legendary Pink Dots, Man, Michael Moorcock, Pink Fairies, Popol Vuh, Pressurehed, Quiet Sun, Ramases, Klaus Schulze, Sky Cries Mary, Sphynx, Tangerine Dream, Steve Took, Nik Turner, Twink AND MORE! |
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SEARCHING FOR THE YOUNG MOD REBELS – THE WHO IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
e-book, 110 pages. Price $5
The definitive saga of the Who in the years pre-Tommy, as seen through the eyes of band members, friends and fans alike. From the earliest days on the Bob Druse circuit, pounding out R&B to the gum-chewing hordes, to the triumph of the Monterey Festival – and beyond! – SEARCHING FOR THE YOUNG MOD REBELS delves deep into the psychology and the psychosis of the Who, as they transformed themselves from Pop Art to pop stars, from Mod tickets to mad dogs, and established Pete Townshend as the most inventively literate songwriter of his generation.
Searching for the Young Mod Rebels is the third of four books that, taken together, reflect upon the mid-late 1960s life and times of the four most significant bands of that particular era ~ namely, Cream, the Jeff Beck Group, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Who. Already available, Cream: How Eric Clapton Took The World By Storm (Virgin Books) and Truth – Rod Stewart, Ron Wood and the Jeff Beck Group (Cherry Red Books) tell the first two stories; the fourth, For Whom The Wind Cries, will be made available in 2007. |
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| TV SMITH - THE COMPLETE TV SMITH 1980-1984
CD-Rom only - $17 inc worldwide shipping
Between 1980-1984, members of TV Smith's fan club received a free fanzine, running from two to twenty pages, for 43 issues. The entire series has now been archived on CD, 357 black/white pages of text and images (.bmp) comprising a priceless archive not only of TV Smith, Adverts and TV Smith's Explorers news, interviews, reviews etc, but also a wealth of related artists... Richard Strange (including a 1981 interview), Doctors of Madness (including a complete band history), Lords of the New Church (three very early interviews, pre-first album), Ian Mitchell Band, Last Touch, many more.
Includes discographies, biographies, family trees, press cuttings, much more.
Unpublished in any other form.
Photos were taken from one of no more than three surviving complete sets, and reflect the occasionally haphazard photocopying that characterized the series - however, all are readable, while the bmp/bitmap format allows the user to print and reconfigure pages at will. Disc also includes a couple of unpublished issues, and color originals of several covers. |
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