Bücher von Sean Egan

The year 1979 was a seminal watershed moment in rock music. The year saw the release of Pink Floyd's The Wall, David Bowie's Lodger, Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Armed Forces, Joe Jackson's Look Sharp! and I'm the Man, Stiff Little Fingers' Inflammable Material, Gary Numan/Tubeway Army's Replicas and the Pleasure Principle, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, the Jam's Setting Sons, the Clash's London Calling, and the UK 2-Tone phenomenon. It also saw a slump in album sales, a resurgence in single sales, and the peak and bloody death of disco. Now, with the help of new and exclusive interviews with artists and producers, New Waves, Old Hands, and Unknown Pleasures tells the varied, vibrant, and often unexamined story of popular music in 1979. It reveals the stories behind key recordings, traces the trajectories of commercial and artistic successes, and explains the musical and socio-political context behind the sounds of the day.

Sick of Being Me is the alternately exhilarating and harrowing story of guitarist Paul Hazelwood, from his childhood on a London council estate, where he nurtures his dreams of stardom, to his agonising realisation on the cusp of his thirties that talent doesn't necessarily bring success. Egan spurns sensationalism to portray the reality of the life of a struggling musician. Similar authenticity informs the drug scenes, which reveal the touching pain that can be hidden beneath an unpleasant junkie exterior. Vulnerable, truthful, moving and beautiful, Sick of Being Me is one of the great coming-of-age novels of our time.

Leiber & Stoller. Mann & Weil. Greenwich & Barry. Bobby Hart. Chip Taylor. Holland-Dozier-Holland. Tony Macaulay. Stock, Aitken & Waterman. Few would recognise them in the street but their melodies and lyrics are embedded in the minds of music lovers worldwide. With the aid of lengthy and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in the history of rock and pop songwriting, Sean Egan's The Guys Who Wrote 'em seeks to put right the lack of recognition for compositional geniuses who have chosen to use their musical skills to help not themselves but others achieve stardom. The result is a recounting of the story of post-Elvis popular music from an intriguing and delightful lateral angle. Amongst those to whom respected music journalist Egan has been granted access are Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, Eddie and Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Bobby Hart, Joey Levine, Graham Gouldman, Chip Taylor, Tony Macaulay, Nicky Chinn, Mike Stock and Matt Aitken. Their anecdotes feature Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Eric Clapton, The Shangri-Las, Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix and a host of other iconic figures. The Guys Who Wrote 'em is both the most comprehensive book ever written about the 'bespoke songwriter' and the fascinating, untold story of popular music.

In The Clash: The Only Band That Matters, respected music critic Sean Egan examines The Clash's career and art through the prism of the uniquely interesting and fractious UK politics of the Seventies and Eighties, without which they simply would not have existed. Tackling subjects such as The Clash's self-conscious tussles with their record label, the accusations of sell-out that dogged their footsteps, their rivalry with the similarly leaning but less purist Jam, the paradoxical quality of their achieving multi-platinum success and even whether their denunciations of Thatcherism were proven wrong, Egan has come up with new insights into a much discussed group.