Left to right: Barry Miles, John Cavanagh, Rob Chapman.



Chapman’s book ‘Syd Barrett’ (Faber paperback original) is an exploration of a songwriter and artist whose musical influence resonated through punk, post-punk and the artier end of Britpop. Including for the first time extensive interviews with the Barrett family, and with reference to his letters, juvenilia, and work as an artist, Syd Barrett is, finally, the book this most extraordinary of English eccentrics deserves.

Rob Chapman has been a regular contributor to Mojo magazine since 1995 and is the author of ‘Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio’ (1992) and ‘The Vinyl Junkyard’ (1996). His novel ‘Dusk Music’ was published in 2008. In the late 1970s he was singer and lyricist with Bristol post punk band Glaxo Babies.

In ‘London Calling’ (Atlantic Books) Barry Miles explores the counter culture that sprang up in the decades following the Second World War, focussing on the West End and Soho, when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazzbars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Bacon and the legendary Colony Club, the 1960s and the Summer of Love, the rise of punk and the early days of the YBAs. The vitality and excitement of these days and years of change leap off the page of this marvellously evocative and riveting book.

Barry Miles is one of the most famous biographers of the sixties and seventies music scene. His books include Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, In the Sixties, The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963, Hippie which was published in 2003 and Frank Zappa by Atlantic in 2006.