A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century. An ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the false distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture in favour of a borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are part of the same vision. Here is the triumphant vindication of the alienated suburban dandy. A cast of thousands, a gallery of Britain's finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell & Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy's, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf, The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three, Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks, Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond, etc, etc.

England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie

Politics & Social Sciences

Bracewell, Michael

Social Sciences

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

With this title, Bracewell gives us the first consideration of that still-warm, still-bizarre, still-confused and confusing decade just ended. He talks to and talks about a host of representative nineties figures, some already forgotten, some absolutely emblematic of their times - from Hanson to Neil Hannon, from Tracey Emin to Hussein Chalayan, from the Spice Girls to Sean Hughes. Painstakingly, sometimes painfully, he puts all the pieces together and starts to make sense of it all...

The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth

Flamingo

England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

SAINT RACHEL

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Saint Rachel

He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell, celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a "cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read When Surface Was Depth and discover why Time Out has called Michael Bracewell, in a word, "terrific."

When Surface Was Depth: Death by Cappuccino and Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990's

Arts & Photography

Music

Da Capo

In 1972 an English rock band released its first album to instant critical acclaim: Roxy Music. Here was a group that looked as though it came not only from another era, but also from another planet-a band in which art, fashion, and music would combine to create, in Bryan Ferry's words, above all, a state of mind.” Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay, and Phil Manzanera, Re-Make/Re-Model tells how Pop Art, the 1960s underground, and Swinging London were transformed into a unique sound and look-theatrical, arch, literate, clever, sexy, thrilling. In the tradition of Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie, Re-Make/Re-Model is the story of extraordinary individuals and exceptional creativity-and nothing less than the history of an era in music and pop culture.

Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music

Business & Money

Da Capo Press

Offers a satiric look at modern mores through the story of Miles Harrier, a young businessman, and the three women interested in him, Kelly O'Kelly, a performance artist, Lucinda Fortune, a psychic, and Stella Walker-Jones, a secretary-turned-model

Divine Concepts Of Physical Beauty

KNOPF

A novel by the author of "Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty". It charts the first 31 years of the life of a suburban dilettante with aesthetic aspirations, who begins a lucrative career at the start of the Eighties. The story roams from the edge of London's suburbia to the nice part of Bristol.

The conclave

Secker Warburg

Used - Very Good: Pages and dust cover are clean and intact; not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine is undamaged.

Re-make/re-model

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Faber&Faber

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Books by Bracewell, Michael