Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Music

Just about every human being knows how to listen to music, but what does it take to make music? Is musicality something we are born with? Or a skill that anyone can develop at any time? If you don't start piano at the age of six, is there any hope? Is skill learning best left to children or can anyone reinvent him-or herself at any time?

Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry. But navigating fame and family wasn't always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family.

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course.

In this thoroughly modern memoir, the man the Guardian once dubbed "half Dostoevsky… half Samuel Pepys" tells a freewheeling, funny and fearlessly honest tale of Birmingham and London, ecstasy and epilepsy, Twitter-fear and Spectrum joysticks, spread betting and growing up. He writes of his musical inspirations, role models and rivals, the craft of song writing, and reflects on the successes and failures of the decade-long journey of The Streets.

Many people will recognise the famous zebra crossing. Some visitors may have graffitied their name on its hallowed outer walls. Others might even have managed to penetrate the iron gates. But what draws in these thousands of fans here, year after year? What is it that really happens behind the doors of the most celebrated recording studio in the world? It may have begun life as an affluent suburban house, but it soon became a creative hub renowned around the world as a place where great music, ground-breaking sounds and unforgettable tunes were forged.

From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley's Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis's unique life, Pulp, 20th-century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he'd rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process—writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason knows and feels the transformative power of music as much as any musician alive. From winning the prestigious BBC Young Musician Award to performing at Harry and Meghan’s wedding; from Bach’s solo suites to Bob Marley’s reggae; his ferocious passion shines through in every single performance, whether in a packed-out concert hall or on record.

By the time she was 14, Chrissie Hynde knew she had to get out of Akron, Ohio. Her perfect '50s American childhood upturned by a newly acquired taste for rock 'n' roll, motorbikes and the ‘get down boys' seen at gigs in and around Cleveland - Mitch Ryder, the Jeff Beck Group, the Velvet Underground and David Bowie among the many.

"I was 22 years old, a hard-on with a pulse: wretched vice-ridden, too much to burn and not enough minutes in a hour to do so. 1995 was a full 365-day year of drinking, fucking, lying, raging and exploration for me - not a dull one in the bunch. It was a time of self-shit: self-importance, self-absorption, self-indulgence and selfishness. I was the only person in the known galaxy and I wanted what the fuck I wanted sooner rather than later." The action begins in Iowa, where Corey Taylor committs each of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3. Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialised and complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels and tired terminology.

The era of the LP began in 1967, with Sgt Pepper; The Beatles didn’t just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made an Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make an Album. The end came only 15 years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets, and the record business had begun trying to reverse engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.

A no-holds-barred look into the remarkable life and career of the prolific musician, songwriter, and producer behind Eurythmics and dozens of pop hits. Dave Stewart’s life has been a wild ride - one filled with music, constant reinvention, and the never-ending drive to create. Growing up in industrial Northern England, he left home for the gritty London streets of the 70's, where he began collaborating and performing with various musicians, including a young waitress named Annie Lennox.

At the March on Washington, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers in the world, but, she told the crowd, 'I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too'. Inspired by these words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a stirring meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide.

Beethoven by Oxford Professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way. Each chapter focuses on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, from heroism to liberty. It's a winning combination of rich biographical detail, insight into the music and surprising new angles, all of which can transform how you listen to his works. We discover, for example, Beethoven's oddly modern talent for self-promotion, how he was influenced by factors from European wars to instrument building and how he was heard by contemporaries.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Secrets for the Mad by dodie, read by dodie, Joshua Edwards, Hazel Hayes, Jack Howard, Daniel J. Layton, Sammy Paul, Benjamin Redwood and Rebecca Fortuin. A lot of my worst fears have come true - fears that felt so big I could barely hold them in my head. I was convinced that when they happened, the world would end. But the world didn't end. In fact, it pushed on and demanded to keep spinning through all sorts of mayhem, and I got through it.

At seven years old, Min Kym was a prodigy, the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At 11 she won her first international prize. She worked with many violins, waiting for the day she would play 'the one'. At 21 she found it: a rare 1696 Stradivarius, perfectly suited to her build and temperament. Her career soared. She recorded the Brahms concerto, and a world tour was planned. Then, in a train station café, her violin was stolen. In an instant her world collapsed. She descended into a terrifying limbo land, unable to play another note.

You can learn to play music, no matter what you've been told about your musical talent or aptitude. With the right instruction and methods, learning to play music can be an endless source of joy and fulfillment. And learning to play music isn't just fun, it's also the ideal brain fitness activity. Dr. Turknett, a neurologist, self-taught multi-instrumentalist, and the founder of Brainjo and the Brainjo Method of instruction, distills the principles of learning to play music down into a set of universal "laws" that can be applied to any instrument.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen. Book of Longing is Leonard Cohen's first book of new poetry since Book of Mercy was published two decades ago. It collects Cohen's poetry written between the 1980s and the present. Book of Longing demonstrates the range and depth of Cohen's work, revealing an extraordinary gift of language that speaks with rare clarity, passion and timelessness.

Cilla Black is without doubt one of Britain's most treasured personalities. Generations have grown up with Cilla's music, TV shows, and performances. But how much do we really know about "the girl with the bright red hair and the jet black voice"? What's It All About? is Cilla's own story, told for the first time ever.

At the dawn of the '90s, Mark Ronson was a New York city prep school kid playing guitar in a mediocre band, harbouring far-fetched dreams of rock n' roll stardom. His stepdad, Mick Jones from Foreigner, was an actual rock star, and his mum, Ann Dexter-Jones, lived like a rock star. But Ronson was the least talented musician in his own teenage band. Then, one Friday night in December 1992, he went to an all-ages rave in a warehouse downtown, and his entire life changed. He would devote himself to deejaying.