Search results for ""Author Kris Needs""

Drawing upon extensive new first hand interview material from Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and many other significant players in the band's long history, a huge archive of personal materials and unpublished interviews, Blondie: Parallel Lives is the definitive eye-witness account of the group's long and often tumultuous existence. Beginning with their childhoods, backgrounds and influences, the book is also an evocative homage to the unique New York scene of the 1970s. It charts the development of Blondie to their massive popular success and eventual break up. How Debbie Harry set her career aside to nurse Chris through a debilitating and life-threatening genetic disease. It recounts the group's 1997 reformation, subsequent renaissance with their No Exit album, the controversies surrounding the 2006 induction to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, ending in the present with the release of Panic of Girls. Co-author Kris Needs established a friendship with Harry, Stein and the rest of the band that endures to this day. As a trusted confidante, he now recounts the full story.

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The biography of George Clinton, one of music's most fascinating, colourful and innovative characters, featuring a new cover and foreword by critic Miles Marshall Lewis.

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The first in-depth biography of one of music's most fascinating, colourful and innovative characters. This book is the most comprehensive history yet of the life, music and cultural significance of the last of the great black music pioneers and the era which spawned him. Clinton stands alongside James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone as one of the most influential black artists of all time who, along with his vast P-Funk army took black funk into the US charts and sold out stadiums by the mid 1970s with his mind-blowing shows and legendary Mothership extravaganzas. The book contains first hand interview material with Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Jerome "Bigfoot" Brailey, Junie Morrison, Bobby Gillespie, Afrika Bambaataa, Jalal Nuriddin (Last Poets), Juan Atkins, John Sinclair, Rob Tyner (MC5), Ed Sanders (The Fugs), Chip Monck ("The Voice of Woodstock") plus other P-Funk associates and friends. The book presents an insiders' view of the rise of Parliament and Funkadelic from the doowop era and LSD-crazed early shows through to P-Funk's huge rise, the era of the Mothership and beyond.

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Always steered by Alex Paterson, The Orb were the mischief-making pioneers of the late 80s acid house revolution. Inventing "ambient house", they took it to the top of the charts, before continuing its idiosyncratic flight path through subsequent decades, battling meteor storms en route. Babble On An' Ting, the first full account of Paterson's life, written by long-time friend Kris Needs in close collaboration with Alex, reveals a frequently astonishing journey from traumatic childhood through punk, Killing Joke and KLF to starting The Orb in 1988, then the five decade roller coaster that followed. Moving, shocking, hilarious and inspiring, at the heart of this story lies a true survivor doggedly following their musical passion. First-hand interviews include those with Youth, Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble, Jimmy Cauty and a parade of friends, collaborators and starship mechanics.

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