Crooners sing close to the mic in a soft, intimate style. In Crooner, Alex Coles explores the crooner in popular music from the 1950s to the present. Each chapter focuses on one song and one singer – Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, Barry White, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Tom Waits, Grace Jones, Ian McCulloch, Nick Cave and Nas – and examines in detail how each contributes to the crooner image. The book describes how crooners traverse era, gender, geography and genre …

+ Listen to a playlist of songs / artists examined in Crooner on Spotify

The Monkees: Made in Hollywood explores the system behind the Monkees, a group that in Tom Kemper’s study represent the cumulative result of a complex coordination of talented individuals, from songwriters to studio musicians to producers – the system of the 1960s Hollywood music industry. The new rock criticism bewailed the fake band, while fans and audiences made the Monkees a major commercial success. More than any other example from that era, the Monkees illustrate the genius of the system and its role in popular music.

Alex Harvey’s Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles; from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time (1973), to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones (1983). Starting his song-writing career in the ’70s, Waits absorbed LA's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes.

‘Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself excels in its understanding of how the music is characterized by its unique relationship to time, its seizing of the moment as an existential act.’ - Los Angeles Review of Books. In the fifties, when rock ‘n’ roll first burst into life the shockwaves reverberated around the world, aided by the images of untamed youth brought to life on screen. But for rock's performers showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. That world was blown apart by the events of the sixties and the decades that followed …

Peter Gabriel: Global Citizen offers a nuanced and trenchant insight into this enigmatic musician and his works, an artist whose constant travelling – through identities, influences and media – defines him as one of modern culture’s truly global citizens.

At the heart of Paul Hegarty’s astute analysis is the idea of locatedness: what it means to be in a specific place at a given time, and to reflect on that time and the changes which inevitably occur. Gabriel’s work, Hegarty argues, can be understood as a series of reflections on the ‘where’ of being.

Jimi Hendrix: Soundscapes offers fascinating new insight into Hendrix’s resounding talent and the way he exploited the physical places and noise around him to create his distinct, innovative sound. The book traces Hendrix’s personal and musical trajectory through the places in which he played, following him from the Pacific Northwest to the California coast, through the South and on to New York City, and from his musical beginnings as a youth in Seattle to his debut, touring career and his last weeks in London.

Since his untimely death in 1974 at the age of 26, singer-songwriter Nick Drake has not only gained a huge international audience, which eluded him during his lifetime, but has come to represent the epitome of English romanticism. Drake’s small but much-loved body of work has evoked comparisons with Blake, Keats, Vaughan Williams and Delius, placing him within a long line of English mystical Romantics. Nathan Wiseman-Trowse’s Nick Drake: Dreaming England explores how ideas of Englishness have come to be so intimately associated with the cult singer songwriter.

In Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora Paul Sullivan explores the evolution of dub. As a set of studio strategies and techniques, Dub was among the first forms of popular music to turn the idea of song inside out, and is still far from being fully explored. With a unique grip on dance, electronic and popular music, dub-born notions of remix and re-interpretation set the stage for the music of the twenty-first century.

This book explores the origins of dub in 1970s Kingston, Jamaica, and traces its evolution as a genre, approach and attitude to music to the present day.

‘I hate the word maturing,’ singer David Lee Roth once said. ‘I don't like the word evolving - or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.’ Examining Roth’s sentiment, Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock‘n’roll follows the band’s pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' - a state of mind and way of being that above all celebrates ‘the now’. In rock‘n’roll terms it stands for the unregulated expenditure of energy; for a youthful exuberance that seems destined to extinguish itself.

Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the formation of The Police, Sting: From Northern Skies to Fields of Gold is the first book to examine the relationship between Sting’s working-class background in Newcastle and the creativity and inspiration behind his music.

Focusing on the sometimes-blurry borderlines between nostalgia, facts, imagination and memories – as told by Sting, the people who knew (and know) him, and those who have written about him – Paul Carr investigates the often complex resonance between local boy Gordon Sumner and the star the world knows as Sting.

Born on the unlit streets of Buenos Aires, tango was inspired by the music of European immigrants who crossed the ocean to Argentina, lured by the promise of a better life. In the capital’s marginal districts, it was embraced and shaped by young men who told tales of prostitutes, petty thieves and disappointed lovers through its music and movements. Chronicling the stories told through tango’s lyrics, Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes in Tango: Sex and the Rhythm of the City, show how the dance went from slumming it in the brothels and cabarets of lower-class Buenos Aires to the ballrooms of Paris, London, Berlin and beyond.

When Neil Young left his native Canada in 1966 to move to California, his journey sparked a leap in musical artistry that would come to resonate throughout North America. Martin Halliwell’s Neil Young: American Traveller shows how place looms large in Young’s songs: Los Angeles is seen as the home of uptight business and lost innocence, while San Francisco is seen as the retreat Young needed from the excesses of the music industry. These locations helped craft the singer-songwriter’s distinct style, which led to his popularity as a solo artist and as a member of Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Of all the great British bands to emerge from the 1960s, none had a stronger sense of place than the Kinks. In The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached Mark Doyle examines the relationship between the Kinks and their city, from their early songs of teenage rebellion to their album-length works of social criticism. He finds fascinating and sometimes surprising connections with figures as diverse as Edmund Burke, John Clare and Charles Dickens. More than just a book about the Kinks, this is a book about a social class undergoing a series of profound changes, and about a group of young men who found a way to describe, lament and occasionally even celebrate those changes through song.

Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine analyzes the events surrounding the emergence, the eventful career and the subsquent implosion of the Sex Pistols in a manner that could be said to provide an instance of what cultural historian Robert Darnton labelled 'incident analysis'. The book draws on accounts of events as understood by participants at the time, relating it as a story – as against much post-hoc rationalising or culture industry representations made decades after the fact about what the Pistols 'meant' – to reveal the growing conflict between the artistic ambitions of two principal actors, Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon, who held divergent ideas about who and what the Sex Pistols were.

The Beatles in Hamburg by Ian Inglis is the first detailed, objective analysis of the events and personalities that shaped The Beatles as performers, composers and musicians, and the role that Hamburg itself played in their remarkable story. Ian Inglis illuminates this obscure period in Beatles history, providing a revealing view of a crucial, formative period for the group. Written by one of the world’s leading scholars of The Beatles and their music, the book will be of immense interest to fans of the group, as well as those interested in the history of popular music and the social history of the 1960s.

Tobias Rüther’s Heroes is the fascinating story of David Bowie’s years in Berlin, where he worked on his ‘Berlin Triptych’, the albums Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger, which are now considered some of the most critically acclaimed and innovative of the late twentieth century.

But Bowie’s time in Berlin was about more than producing new music. As explained in this fascinating account of the Berlin years, Bowie moved to the city to repair his body and mind from the devastation of drug addiction, delusions and mania. In the course of this rehabilitiation he became an artist of extraordinary brilliance and originality.

The figure of the gypsy is simultaneously vilified and romanticized. Gypsies have for centuries been associated with criminality and dirt, but also with colour, magic and music. Gypsy music is popular around the world, and is performed at occasions that include weddings in Bulgaria, jazz shows in Paris and festivals in the USA. Covering the thirteenth century to the present day, and with a geographical scope that ranges from rural Romania to New York by way of Budapest, Moscow and Andalusia, Alan Ashton-Smith’s Gypsy Music: The Balkans and Beyond reveals the remarkable diversity of this exuberant art form.

Seth Bovey’s Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present tells of an explosive musical phenomenon whose continuing influence on popular culture is dramatic and deep. The tale begins in 1950s America, when classic rock ’n’ roll was reaching middle age and teenage musicians kept its primal rawness going with rough-hewn instrumentals. In the mid-1960s, the Beatles and the British Invasion conquered America, and soon every neighbourhood had its own garage band.

In Brazilian Jive, David Treece uncovers the genius of Brazilian song, both as a sophisticated, articulate art form crafted out of the dialogue between music and language and as a powerfully eloquent expression of the country’s social and political history. Focusing on the cultural struggles of music-making in Brazil, this book traces their journey from the rise of samba through the bossa nova revolution of the late 1950s to the emergence of rap in the 1990s. It describes how Brazilian music grew out of the pain and dispossession of slavery and, inspired by African traditions, how it celebrates new ways of moving freely in time and space.