Bøger i Decades serien

The 1970s saw the rise of rock and metal as a force in record and ticket sales. Right there at the birth of this was Black Sabbath, whose first album came from nowhere to smash into the top of the charts in Britain and around the world. This is a comprehensive roundup of the band's music in the decade.

Yes are widely recognised as pioneers of progressive rock through their defining work in the 1970s, including classic records such as Fragile and Close to the Edge. The band then went on to completely re-invent themselves in the 1980s. They achieved huge commercial success with the album 90125 and global hit 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'. But there has been little acknowledgement of their achievements in the ten years that followed, paving the way for three more decades in an extraordinary 50 plus-year-long career. Examining six more albums, the arrival of multi-instrumentalist Billy Sherwood, successful tours, solo and film projects, a move into the digital age, and consolidation of a worldwide fanbase, Yes in the 1990s adds a fresh twist to the story of this revered band. Simon Barrow followed Yes closely in the '90s, seeing them dozens of times on both sides of the Atlantic. He charts an underestimated era of development in the Yes sound, encompassing multiple personnel changes. Bookended by notable tours for Union and The Ladder, the '90s is a tale of Yes-intransition, as the search for new musical horizons sees their influence mutate across everything from art pop to global fusion.

There were a lot of very different bands peddling their wares in the progressive rock 'golden age' of the 1970s - some tending toward symphonic grandeur, other towards jazz fusion, and others still ploughing the more immediate end of the spectrum. There were the left-field eccentrics and the tricky 'difficult' bands. Apart from it all, however, there were Van Der Graaf Generator. In a decade stuffed with a wild array of influences, styles and instrumental line-ups, there can be few tending quite so near to the definition 'unique' as the four musicians who made up the 'classic' line-up of Van Der Graaf. For a start, there was the astonishing songwriting and vocals of generally accepted 'leader' Peter Hammill, but there was much more behind that to set these men apart. Their unparalleled instrumental make-up saw little or no guitar and no bass guitar, while organist Hugh Banton handled the bass parts on pedals, David Jackson pioneered an astonishing saxophone style, playing two instruments at once, electric rather than miked up, and using a full effects pedalboard. Drummer Guy Evans filled in - well, everything else. It was and remains a sound quite like no other. This book documents their incredibly influential first decade as prog's ultimate 'outsiders'. It's quite a ride

Status Quo are a British institution - a multi-million selling band of epic proportions and while their career was in it's hey day during the 1970s, the hits kept coming through the 1980s along with breakups, lawsuits, line-up changes, substance abuse and a high-profile, highly successful comeback after calling it a day in 1984. While much has been written about the 'glory years', Quo's difficult but triumphant struggle through the 1980s is a much more exciting story with twists, turns and a sense of peril that feels like it could go either way. This is a celebration of Quo's music at its most vulnerable and experimental, at a time when the band lost old fans, gained new ones and made some of the most varied and creative recordings of their career. No stone has been left unturned with several members of the band contributing stories and anecdotes from their own perspectives that should leave even the most knowledgeable of fans feeling like they've learned something.

Having moved from jazz, Blues and R'n'B to out-and-out pop in his various 1960s bands, keyboard player Manfred Mann went back to the drawing board in 1971 with a new quartet, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and the intention of focusing on progressive rock. With a repertoire that leant partly on radical rearrangements of songs by Bob Dylan and then Bruce Springsteen, largely instrumental epics that borrowed from Gustav Holst's The Planets suite, and improvisations based around the interplay between Manfred's newly-acquired moog synthesiser and the lead guitar of Mick Rogers, who left in 1975 but later returned, they soon built up a formidable live reputation throughout much of Europe (particularly in Germany) and America. Apart from the Holst-inspired 'Joybringer', a top ten hit in 1973, British success was slow in coming, until a cover version of Springsteen's 'Blinded by the Light' and its parent album The Roaring Silence three years later took their status to a new level on both sides of the Atlantic. This book examines the nine albums, fluctuating fortunes and various line-up changes from what was to be their best and most prolific decade.

They pulled on their platform boots and slapped on the makeup when everybody else was discarding theirs. Their albums were subject to poor production, scathing reviews, and commercial indifference. Other bands refused to have them as their opening act. Their record company was up against the wall. By all reasoning, they should have become one of the 'lost' bands of the 1970s, like the Harlots of 42nd Street or the Hollywood Stars. Yet in 1975 Kiss unexpectedly came Alive! and by the following year, they were the biggest rock and roll band - and brand - in America. This is a journey through Kiss's first and most storied decade. It is the story of the four men behind the masks, and the music they made, the studio albums, the legendary live albums, and of one of the greatest rock follies in music history, the four simultaneously released solo album. Along the way, it tells of the costumes and the concerts, the merchandise and the Marvel comic books, the television appearances and the disastrous 1978 movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. And having bestrode the 1970s like an unstoppable colossus, it ends with Kiss under siege, beset by changing public taste without, and combustible personalities within.

George Harrison was known as 'The Quiet Beatle', although this title did him a disservice, considering his intellectual focus and thoughtful nature. Instead, he was arguably 'The Chameleonic Beatle', a moniker that only serves to understand the deeply complex guitar player better. And in a deeply complicated decade, Harrison's artistry flourished.

Propelled into stardom at an exhilarating speed due to clever marketing and virtuosity in their musicianship, particularly violinist Darryl Way, the story of Curved Air in the 1970s is of a band that burned brightly before collapsing well ahead of their time.

Free were formed in 1968 towards the end of the British blues boom. After two critically acclaimed albums, the release of 'All Right Now' and the album Fire and Water in 1970 brought them major success. Musical and personal differences took their toll and they split after the comparative failure of their next album and single.

Long, unfurling tracks; huge stacks of gear; music like that of no other group; trailblazing live gigs based on improvisation. This is the legacy of Tangerine Dream, the legendary German group piloted by Edgar Froese, whose impact on music, and electronic music in particular, has been profound.

Genesis remain the best known and best loved progressive rock band in the UK, bar none. While the 1980s represent their most profitable period as pop starts, their core fans turn to the 1970s for the band's true artistic peak.

Britpop Decades covers the ten-years that witnessed the birth, boom and bust of Britpop - a period in which home-grown indie guitar music from across the UK went mainstream, pop stars were cut from the most unlikely of cloth, and British culture made its voice heard with some incredibly bombastic choruses.

Championed by David Bowie, Mott The Hoople became one of the best known bands of the Glam era. A succession of top twenty singles in 1973 and 1974. Ian Hunter went on to commercial success and critical acclaim as a solo artist.

No period of Bob Dylan's six-decade career confounds fans more than the 1980s. The singer began the decade with Saved, the second in a trio of explicitly religious records, and a tour in which he declined to play his older songs because of concern they were anti-god.

The first in a series of four books looking at the history of the band in detail, decade by decade, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Covers the band's earliest success at the end of the 1960s, and their formative work in Australia.

With most authors concentrating on the group's 1970s career, Yes in the 1980s looks in forensic detail at this relatively underexamined era of the band's history, featuring rarely seen photos researched by author David Watkinson.

Here is the story of Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s - the music, the people, the tours, the rumours, the failures and the successes. While it's impossible to ignore the skill and longevity of the albums Fleetwood Mac, Rumours and Tusk, there are an equal number of half-forgotten classic songs from the first half of the 1970s.

Stephen Lambe's enlightening book guides the reader through Focus's early history year by year, dealing with all eight Focus albums song by song, while also giving the same treatment to Akkerman and Van Leer's lesser know solo work between 1970 and 1979.

It may have all started with Syd Barrett, but the persistence and creativity of Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour meant that Pink Floyd went from one of England's top underground psychedelic bands to one of the biggest rock bands on the planet - all thanks to an album wondering if there really was a dark side of the moon.