Spanning Tom Waits’ extraordinary 40-year career, from “Closing Time” to “Orphans”, “Lowside of the Road” is Barney Hoskyns’ unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in ’70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as Swordfishtrombones – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album. Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.

Price : £ 10.39

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In “Post Everything”, Luke Haines demonstrates that the only way to survive the tyrannical scourge of Britpop is to become an Outsider. The ‘avant-garde Arthur Scargill’ calls upon the nation’s pop stars to down tools and go on strike. We learn the story of Haines’ post-Britpop art house trio Black Box Recorder (Chas and Dave with a chanteuse), we meet a talking cat, two dead rappers (Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur), a mystical England football manager, and a shady transgender German Professor – exponent of a dangerous and radical ‘Beatles denial’ cult and author of “The Theorem of the Moron” (the most important book about rock that you’ve never heard of). Haines even finds time to write a musical for the National Theatre. Blisteringly funny and searingly scathing, “Post Everything” may quite possibly be the first and only truly surreal comic rock memoir. It even contains a killer recipe for scrambled eggs.

Price : £ 6.19

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Spanning Tom Waits’ extraordinary 40-year career, from “Closing Time” to “Orphans”, “Lowside of the Road” is Barney Hoskyns’ unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas. Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in ’70s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as Swordfishtrombones – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album. Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.

Price : £ 7.69

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