Rock and roll memoirs from people who were there: Dana Gillespie, studio engineer Phill Brown and Keith West, plus books on The Doors, Dylan and Traffic.
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Category: Biography & Memoir
Who was Percy Shaw?
An extract from 40 Motoring Heroes: Pioneers, Inventors, Mavericks, and Game Changers Percy Shaw: One for The Road Having a pub named after you is an aspiration for some people. Certainly, it’s not a bad epitaph. Nell Gwyn, Charlie Chaplin, John Fielding VC (of the Boer War’s Rorke’s Drift fame),…
Who was Charles F Kettering?
An extract from 40 Motoring Heroes: Pioneers, Inventors, Mavericks, and Game Changers Charles F Kettering: The Second Edison At the beginning of the 20th century, motor cars were rudimentary in many ways. In 1900, when Theodore Roosevelt became the first US President to use one, he took extreme measures. He…
Who was Marcus Sedgwick?
Marcus Sedgwick was an award-winning British writer who passed away in November 2022 in France. Writing in YA, Science Fiction, and Non-Fiction genres (amongst others), he burst onto the scene with Floodland (which won the 2001 Branford Boase Award) and also achieved acclaim with The Foreshadowing, She Is Not Invisible,…
Who is Dana Gillespie?
Dana Gillespie is one of the UK’s top Blues singers, gigging in the UK and Europe regularly, and with more than 50 albums under her belt. She has also appeared on West End stages in productions such as Jesus Christ Superstar, plus numerous movies, including the cult classic The Hound…
“All In Your Head” – Chapter 4 Extract
An excerpt from Chapter 4 of All In Your Head – "Undiagnosis..."– by Marcus Sedgwick. Click on the cover to learn more. * The full horror of not knowing had started to sink in. I was desperate to find out what was wrong with me, and should proof of this…
50 Years of Hard Road – Dark Days
An excerpt from Chapter 4 of 50 Years of Hard Road by Nick Charles MBE. I considered my predicament from every angle following my meeting with the fish man. I walked for miles around the crowded streets of London, looking at various shop windows and sniffing hungrily at the different…
50 Years of Hard Road – Sam, Dave, and Johnny Two Gobs
An excerpt from Chapter 6 of 50 Years of Hard Road by Nick Charles MBE. I cannot begin to imagine what modern-day health and hygiene inspectors would have made of the many hostels I frequented. However, to people like me, they were an absolute godsend. Street people typically take a…
The UFO Club – London 1966
An excerpt from Chapter 9 - Darlings of the Psychedelic Underground - from Thinking About Tomorrow – Excerpts from the life of Keith West While Tomorrow would eventually hitch themselves firmly to the counter-culture and psychedelic bandwagon, it’s important to recognise that, as 1966 came to an end, this was…
Keith West and Excerpt From a Teenage Opera
“What I take the influence back to, was Excerpt from a Teenage Opera, a record in the late 60s, by Keith West that was episodic. That was really the one that was the biggest influence, and then lots of people started doing it. I think it was just that one…