Steal Thus Book

New York Times #1 bestselling author Richard Eyre contends that the three things today's society desires most—control, ownership, and independence—are, paradoxically, what bring the most discouragement and unhappiness in our lives.

Leo Blokhuis is an award winning author and music journalist familiar to Dutch TV audiences as host of a prime time music show ‘Top 2000 a Gogo’. In his latest ‘sound book’ he writes of the period in the 60s and 70s when soul and country music traditions married together to create country soul and vice versa. The book part is 176 pages of Dutch text and since my near neighbours language is not one of the main languages that I can read I am unable to comment on Blokhuis’ writing skills. What I can say is that the text is interspersed with photographs of significant artists, record labels and a page on each featured song that lists studio details and participating musicians. Clearly a labour of love the book looks great and feels substantial.

80 pop-tastic hits from the 70s across 4CDs, all packaged in an attractive card fold out digipck. Includes Abba, Electric Light Orchestra, Blondie, Rod Stewart and more!

Cassette tapes. Remember those? Those things with the dual spools and loads of wide brown plastic recording string that’d occasionally unravel and hang out of the shell, requiring a pencil and firm wrist to spin back into place? Yeah, well, once upon a time, old-school sound systems contained cassette decks for the express purpose of recording shows, and these “cassette” things were a standard part of every tour. Motörhead were certainly no exception, recording show after show. They contain gold, pure aural gold, and had for many years sat hundreds of feet underground in a small cave Lemmy owned, guarded by small, hairy centurions in Roman armor with small spears and bad attitudes. Only the magic password would release them, and thankfully, Lem had scribbled it down and left it inside an old sketch book for us (no, were won’t tell you the password, although it did have the words ’nie nie nie’ in it). There were loads of the dirty, dusty, greasy little buggers gathered, with the likes of Lyon, Liverpool, Hamburg and Chippenham (!!) scrawled in biro on the tiny labels alongside a date…and thus we are delighted to announce that this unique collection of live gems will now be heard by the world, via carefully digitized transfers, in the series titled The Löst Tapes.

The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels.