A no-holds-barred rampage through gigs, clubs, boardrooms, drugs and booze, mad scenes, brilliant signings, machine gun quotes and a resilient wild spirit.
Music is like no other business.
It's about being at the right place at the right time, following your nose and diving in feet first. It's about being plugged into the mystical electricity and about surfing on the wild energy. It's about how to fuck up and how to survive and be sustained by the holy grail of the high decibel.
No-one captures this wild feral spirit better than Alan McGee whose helter-skelter career through music has made him a major force. Wilder than his bands, more out of control than his most lunatic singer, more driven than his contemporaries and closer in spirit to the rock'n'roll star he could never be himself, McGee was always in a rush. Creation would sign people and not just the music. McGee understood that running an indie label is mainly about the charisma, the game changers, the iconography and the story. It's about never being boring.
His ability to start a raw power ruckus brought the visceral danger back to a moribund mid-eighties music scene. His nose for danger and his ear for classic guitar rock'n'roll brought us The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub and Ride before topping out in the nineties with the biggest band in the world, Oasis.
By no means a conventional instruction manual or business book, How To Run an Indie Label tells you everything you need to know about how to be a creative force.
The debut of ChatGPT on November 30th was a watershed moment in the history of technology. We stand on the threshold of a new age — one where content of all kinds, even software itself, will be conjured, seemingly from thin air, with simple conversation.
In a culture fraught with misinformation, Mastering AI pierces through the thicket of exaggerated claims, explaining how we arrived at this moment and mapping the likely long-term impacts on business, economics, culture and society this potent technology will have.
This book will serve as a guide to those dangers — as well as highlighting the technology's transformative potential — and will pinpoint concrete steps that should be taken to regulate generative AI.
NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRRING EMMA STONE, FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE FAVOURITE.
Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize
A life without freedom to choose is not worth having.
Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat. But his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his creation...
But what does Bella think?
This story of true love and scientific daring whirls the reader from the private operating-theatres of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.
'A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book' London Review of Books
'Visionary, ornate and outrageous' The Independent
'Witty and delightfully written' New York Times
'A brilliant marriage of technique, intelligence, and art.' Kirkus Reviews
'The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott' Anthony Burgess
Newbery Award-winning author Richard Peck is at his very best in this fast-paced mystery adventure. Fans of The Tale of Desperaux, A Little Princess, and Stuart Little will all be captivated by this memorable story of a lovable orphan mouse on an amazing quest.
The smallest mouse in London’s Royal Mews is such a little mystery that he hasn't even a name. And who were his parents? His Aunt Marigold, Head Needlemouse, sews him a uniform and sends him off to be educated at the Royal Mews Mouse Academy. There he's called "Mouse Minor" (though it's not quite a name), and he doesn't make a success of school. Soon he's running for his life, looking high and low through the grand precincts of Buckingham Palace to find out who he is and who he might become.
Queen Victoria ought to be able to help him, if she can communicate with mice. She is all-seeing, after all, and her powers are unexplainable. But from her, Mouse Minor learns only that you do not get all your answers from the first asking. And so his voyage of self-discovery takes him onward, to strange and wonderful places.
