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Reading lists

Books to read if you love David Bowie

The definitive biography

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

The first biography of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, whose performance at the Woodstock festival turned them into superstars and whose music and career illuminate the journey and legacy of 1960s counterculture.

Read the definitive biography of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, whose music and career illuminate the legacy of 1960s counterculture. 
 
Between 1969 and 1974, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were the most successful, influential and politically potent rock band in America. More than any of their peers, they channelled and broadcast all the radical anger, romantic idealism and generational angst of their era. The vast emotional range of their music, from delicate acoustic confessionals to raucous counter-culture anthems, was mirrored in the turbulence of their personal lives. 
 
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is the first major biography of a band whose first two albums are undisputed rock classics, and which continues to attract a large and loyal following to their sporadic reunions. At the same time, Peter Doggett illuminates the pivotal years of 1960s counterculture through the story of four of its key protagonists, whose music, beliefs and relationships with each other chronicle both its trajectory and its legacy. 
 
'A fascinating, rip-roaring and timely re-telling of a corner of music history' Frank Turner

Peter Dogett's book is a fascinating, rip-roaring and timely re-telling of a corner of music history that was hugely important but is all too often forgotten. The rehabilitation of Crosby, Stills and Nash's reputation (and of Young's contributions here) is long overdue

Engaging… [Doggett] use[s] the saga of Crosby, Stills, Nash &amp; Young as a metaphor for the Woodstock generation and their doomed mission to return to the garden

[A] meticulous chronicle of Crosby, Stills, Nash &amp; Young… Doggett carefully charts the stalled sessions and schemes caused by this alpha-male jostling… For fans who want detailed chronology, it will be a joy, but Doggett’s book is also a deft portrait of a golden age tarnishing even as the band sang

Especially good on the musicians early lives and early Seventies peak

Doggett… presents a solid, steady, evenhanded portrait. He loves the music without being slavish, and pays each of the musicians their due

Exhaustively researched… If you think you know the history of CSN&amp;Y then read this and, like me, you will be surprised at what you learn

Doggett…treasure[s] the band’s early oeuvre and writes with empathy about the group

From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music

Electric Shock

A thrilling, panoramic history of popular music from the birth of recorded sound to the present day

Dauntlessly comprehensive, elegantly parlayed survey of pop’s recorded history

What Electric Shock imparts… is delight and curiosity in the music it chronicles with such pithy vivacity.

this magnificent book is highly recommended for anyone with more than a passing interest in popular music over the last century or so

a magisterial book… a dense, thorough read, but well worth the effort

Peter Doggett first wrote about feminism and gay liberation in There's a Riot Going On, his 2005 history of the collision between rock music and revolutionary politics. Since then, he has published a series of books about the death of 1960s idealism, and its aftermath, as viewed through the life and work of the Beatles in You Never Give Me Your Money, David Bowie in The Man Who Sold the World and Crosby, Stills, Nash &amp; Young in his 2019 biography of the same name. His other books include a panoramic cultural history of popular music, Electric Shock. He lives in Sussex with the feminist artist and film-maker Rachel Baylis.

Ambitious and groundbreaking, Electric Shock tells the story of popular music, from the birth of recording in the 1890s to the digital age, from the first pop superstars of the twentieth century to the omnipresence of music in our lives, in hit singles, ringtones and on Spotify. 
 
 Over that time, popular music has transformed the world in which we live. Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle the outside world in our daily conversations and encounters. It has influenced our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics. 
 
 From the beginning of recording, when a musical performance could be preserved for the first time, to the digital age, when all of recorded music is only a mouse-click away; from the straitlaced ballads of the Victorian era and the ‘coon songs’ that shocked America in the early twentieth century to gangsta rap, death metal and the multiple strands of modern dance music: Peter Doggett takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of music. Within a narrative full of anecdotes and characters, Electric Shock mixes musical critique with wider social and cultural history and shows how revolutionary changes in technology have turned popular music into the lifeblood of the modern world.

David Bowie And The 1970s

The Man Who Sold The World

Brilliant musical critique; biographical insight and acute cultural analysis, The Man Who Sold The World is a unique study of David Bowie and the 1970s.

Thrilling...takes its place next to Revolution in the Head on the short shelf of necessary reading about pop. Praise doesn't come any higher

A meticulous and engaging insight into the golden years of one of pop's true innovators. For those who love Bowie - a must

An astonishing and absorbing work that expertly unpicks this explosively creative time in Bowie's life... Ultimately, Doggett's insight and enthusiasm should send you back to the music. If you do so the book will ensure you experience something entirely new

Compels you to listen to Bowie's best-known songs afresh and his less obvious songs anew

This is a book, which can be dipped into as a fine song-by-song guide, but even more so, as an excellent cultural history

A forensic analysis of the songs that helped forge his many myths...an impressive, exhaustive account

An exemplary introduction to a star in the making...excellent at placing the sexuality-stretching Bowie within the context of a decade struggling to find its identity

Part historical commentary, part  fanboy's breakdown of every Bowie song from the era

Doggett exhaustively chases Bowie's inspirations and intentions as he morphs from the gender-bending glam rock Ziggy Stardust to the plastic soul-spinning Thin White Duke

This book tracks Bowie's ever changing masks and alter egos... [and] helps answer the question that most Bowie fans have asked at one time or another: what the hell is he on about?

Doggett is no uncritical fan – his intimate knowledge of the industry lends him a cool eye when assessing the extent of Bowie’s originality… Overall it will leave readers of a certain age yearning for the days when they could throw their homework on the fire and take the car downtown

No artist offered a more incisive and accurate portrait of the troubled landscape of the 1970s than David Bowie. Cultural historian Peter Doggett explores the rich heritage of Bowie's most productive and inspired decade, and traces the way in which his music reflected and influenced the world around him. From 'Space Oddity', his dark vision of mankind's voyage into the unknown terrain of space, to the Scary Monsters album, Doggett examines in detail Bowie's audacious creation of an 'alien' rock star, Ziggy Stardust, and his increasingly perilous explorations of the nature of identity and the meaning of fame. 
 
Mixing brilliant musical critique with biographical insight and acute cultural analysis, The Man Who Sold The World is a unique study of a major artist and his times.

Peter Doggett

The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book

[A] fascinating...new book about the decade [the 60's]

Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

I very much enjoyed the ride. Growing Up's strengths lies not so much in it being an expert guide to the seedier side of the 1960s (which it certainly is) but in the question Doggett has woven in every chapter, but just manages to leave unsaid: just how much has changed?

In rich and playful prose, Growing Up knits together material from newspapers, women's magazines, films, television and pop music to create an account of the 1960s that, unlike most popular histories, does not edit out the grim bits

An important reappraisal of a decade that changed us, for good and ill

Peter Doggett's fascinating new book Growing Up shows rather conclusively that the sixties was not a sexual paradise

Sex in the 1960s

No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and vilified than the 1960s. And at the heart of all that controversy - the music, drugs, fashion, hopes, dreams and political movements - is sex. 
 
But were the 1960s really a great time of liberation, joyful experimentation and celebrations of youth? Growing Up takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution. 
 
In this wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the sexual landscape of the 1960s, Peter Doggett has assembled a dozen little-known stories that reveal how the sexual revolution transformed people's lives - for better or worse.

Peter Doggett

Praise for Growing Up

The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book

[A] fascinating...new book about the decade [the 60's]

Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book

[A] fascinating...new book about the decade [the 60's]

Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book

[A] fascinating...new book about the decade [the 60's]

Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

Books by Peter Doggett

Articles featuring Peter Doggett

Books to read if you love David Bowie

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