MUSIC

Pet Shop Boys – Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – are the most successful duo in the history of pop music. Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees, they have sold more than 50 million records worldwide, including No. 1 hits such as ‘West End girls’, ‘It’s a sin’, and ‘Always on my mind’, and platinum-selling albums Please, Actually, and Very.

Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of their first album in 1986, Pet Shop Boys Volume is the definitive retrospective of the duo’s career. Expanding upon Pet Shop Boys Catalogue, published two decades ago, it presents their entire visual output to date, year by year. Sleeve artworks and packaging, stills from every video, film, and performance, stage sets and costume designs, photoshoots, publications, and even Christmas cards all feature, as does every collaboration with luminaries including Mark Farrow, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, Bruce Weber, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Derek Jarman, Scott King, Zaha Hadid, Tom Scutt, and Es Devlin.

This intimate photo chronicle by Polly Samson documents both the recording of David Gilmour's No. 1 album Luck and Strange and the acclaimed tour which saw the Pink Floyd legend playing sellout shows in Rome, London, LA and New York.

Samson, who is Gilmour’s partner and creative collaborator, as well as an acclaimed novelist / photographer in her own right, captures the process as the album takes shape: from conception and recording, off-duty and studio immersion, to release and live performance; from candid behind-the-scenes shots, to theatrical stage moments. We see an artist at work, the collaborative process, the moments of light relief – and the focus as the work takes flight.

This luxurious book is divided into two parts.

The first documents the members of the band between 1972 and 1975, during the making of the album, the album release and throughout the album tours in the UK, US, Europe and Japan through 128 black-and- white photographs. A review of the October 1972 Wembley gig by Chris Charlesworth, originally published in Melody Maker, provides insightinto one of Floyd's most celebrated performances.
The second part explores in 65 color images how the original prism motif by Hipgnosis and StormStudios evolved into an array of graphics and homages to the world's great artists, some of which went on to grace further projects of the band. Co-founder of StormStudios, Peter Curzon, recalls the details of each brief and the development of the graphics over a 50-year period.

In Hip Hop Raised Me.® , DJ Semtex examines the crucial role of hip-hop in society today, and reflects on the huge influence it has had on his own life, and the lives of many others, filling in the gaps of education that school left behind, providing inspiration and purpose to generation after generation of disaffected youths. Taking a thematic approach and featuring seminal interviews he has conducted with key hip-hop artists, Semtex traces the characteristics and influence of hip-hop from its origins in the early 1970s with DJ Kool Herc’s Block parties in the South Bronx, through its breakthrough to the mainstream and advent of gangsta rap in the late 1980s, with artists such as Run DMC, Public Enemy and Ice T, to the impact of contemporary artists and the global industry that is hip-hop today. Hip-hop artists have gone from hustlers to successful entrepreneurs and businessmen. Hip-hop has come of age.