Think Oasis was just Britpop and brawls? Think again.

In this, the definitive book on Britain’s biggest band, John Robb peels back the layers of Manchester's best known musical export, revealing a tale of ambition, ego, talent, and a whole lot of attitude. From the gritty pubs of Manchester to the dizzying heights of global stardom, this unauthorized biography is a rollercoaster ride through the Gallagher brothers' turbulent lives and the music that defined a generation. But it is also a portrait of Britain around the turn of the millennium and the cultural forces and places that shaped, and were shaped by, two cocksure autodidacts from Burnage – from art to fashion, and from football to politics.

Playful, funny and irreverent, and drawing on dozens of interviews and first-hand stories, Live Forever puts Oasis squarely in the Pantheon of Rock ‘n Roll royalty as the last great band of the pre-internet age. So, grab your parka and shades, perfect your swagger, and prepare to be amazed, amused, and maybe even just a little bit shocked.

The Buzzcocks. Joy Division. The Fall. The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy Mondays. Oasis. Manchester has proved to be an endlessly rich seam of pop-music talent over the last 30 years. Highly opinionated and usually controversial, stars such as Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, Ian Brown and the Gallagher brothers have always had plenty to say for themselves. Here, in John Robb’ s new compilation, Manchester’ s gobbiest musicians tell the story of the city’ s thriving music scene in their own words. When the Buzzcocks put on the Sex Pistols at Lester Free Hall in 1976, they kickstarted a musical revolution and a fervent punk scene exploded.

In 1979 the legendary Tony Wilson founded Factory Records, the home of Joy Division/New Order and later the Happy Mondays. The Hacienda, the Factory nightclub, became notorious in the late 1980s as a centre of the influential Madchester scene, led by the Mondays and the Stone Roses, with a unique style and sound of its own. Then, from the ashes of Madchester rose ü ber-lads Oasis, the kings of Britpop and the biggest UK band of the 1990s.

John Robb is a leading music journalist and the author of the bestselling biography of the Stone Roses. His other books include Punk: An Oral History, The Charlatans … We Are Rock and The Nineties: What the F**k Was That All About? He lives in Manchester.

The first ever complete overview of Goth culture will be released in 2023.

Finally, after a decade of work, countless interviews and immersing himself into the culture, John Robb's definitive book is a journey far into The Art Of Darkness. The first in-depth book on Goth is a deep dive into the enduring culture and the social, historical and political backdrop that created the space for The Art Of Darkness to thrive.

680 pages with interviews with the likes of Andrew Eldritch, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, The Cult, The Banshees, The Damned, Einsturzende Neubauten, Danielle Dax, Johnny Marr, Trent Reznor, Adam Ant, Laibach, The Cure, Nick Cave and many others, this is a deepdive and walk on the dark side and into the very heartland of Goth.

Every generation has got to deal with the blues - embrace the melancholy. Find a beauty in the darkness, a poetry in sex and death...Whether it’s the Roman love of ghost stories, European macabre folk tales of the Middle Ages, Romantic poets, or the original Gothic tribes sacking the Eternal City, a walk on the dark side has always had its attractions. In the post-punk period, Generation Xerox saw music, clothes and culture come together to create one of the most enduring pop cultures of them all that still resonates to this day..
Goth.
It may have been a retrospective term for a scene that was already thriving, but its back story goes back millennia. The book starts with the fall of Rome and ends with Instagram and Tik Tok influencers, taking diversions through Lord Byron, European folk tales, Indian sadhus, Gothic architecture, Romantic poets, philosophers and idealists before coalescing through the dark end of the Sixties’ youthquake, and then blooming like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal in the post-punk period.

Defying the broken heartland of the post-industrial cities, the semi-forgotten satellite towns and the grim real politic of the Thatcher years, this was a post-punk culture full of dark dance and a death disco. The music soundtracked the style and a Stygian obsidian soundtrack fused the many fragments of culture that had been flirted with in the post-war pop narrative; a darker culture that began to coalesce around the holy trinity of the Doors, the Velvets and the Stooges in the late Sixties before flirting with glam rock, being amplified by punk, exploding as Goth, and then splintering into electronic dance music, industrial, psychobilly and new Goth, before finally filtering through dystopian Hollywood blockbusters, modern literature and throughout the modern world.

In the late Seventies, Goth culture emerged around a clutch of bands who found a new form of beauty in the apocalyptic foreboding, as a new youth tribe took glam rock from the catwalk to the cobbles and onto their own dance floors, creating their own art of darkness.