Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Arts & Entertainment

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, written and read by Elvis Costello. In a career spanning four decades, Elvis Costello (born Declan MacManus) has made himself a huge reputation through his tunes, lyrics and occasional bad behaviour. Now, for the first time, he is telling his story.

For the last two years, Frank Skinner has managed to squeeze in a weekly column for The Times. Without fail, he sat down every week and wracked his brain to think of something to write 900 words about. This is the brilliant result.

Musicians know how to stay ahead of the beat. Forced to find new ways to adapt to accelerating change, musicians are masters of innovation. Demystifying their process for the first time, Two Beats Ahead reveals what we can learn from today's top musical minds. Drawing from interviews and case studies with masterminds like Quincy Jones, Jimmy Iovine, Dr Dre, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams, as well as leaders at Google X and Amazon, this book identifies the key lessons and skills musicians can teach us about innovation.

Vocal leader James Sills believes that group singing has the power to change lives. It is a joyful expression of our humanity that gives us purpose, encourages us to be fully present, and helps us to foster social bonds. In Do Sing, James invites us to look back on our singing journey. Was there a time when you stopped singing or were told you couldn't sing? Do certain songs trigger happy memories?

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.

In Music and Medicine, bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin delves into the latest research on the interaction of music, mood, health, and the biology of our brain. In it, he explains how music can lead to lasting improvements in our brain and body, increasing brain function and connectivity, boosting neuroplasticity and even strengthening our immune system.

Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight – The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.

Taking us from the present day back to the dawn of time, long-lost music is here reconstructed as we enter the worlds of its makers. We feel a child's delight at playing with a water-filled pot that chirps like a bird in Peru in 700 AD; we appreciate the challenge of a soldier sending signals by trumpet along Hadrian's Wall; we hear the chiming of 64 bells buried in a tomb in 5th century China. Graeme Lawson leads us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, revealing that music is part of our DNA.

Norman Wisdom's early years could easily have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Left by their frightened mother and ill-treated by a brutal father, Norman and his brother were forced to fend for themselves, sleeping rough in London and stealing food to survive. This is a rags to riches tale of the man Charlie Chaplin said would take his mantle and who went on to make millions laugh around the world for over five decades.

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.

Dividing the sum total of human musical achievement, from Beethoven to The Beatles, Busta Rhymes to Bach, into just six fundamental forms, Levitin illuminates, through songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love, how music has been instrumental in the evolution of language, thought and culture. And how, far from being a bit of a song and dance, music is at the core of what it means to be human.

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in 20th-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.

Landscapes reflect and shape our behaviour. They make us who we are and bear witness to the shifting patterns of human life over the generations. Formed by a complex series of natural and human processes, they rarely yield their secrets readily. Bringing to bear a lifetime's digging, Francis Pryor delves into England's hidden urban and rural landscapes, from Whitby Abbey to the navvy camp at Risehill in Cumbria, from Tintagel to Tottenham's Broadwater Farm.

Have you ever watched a film with someone who, at the most dramatic scene, argues that the plane on screen hasn't been invented yet? Or that the tank rumbling towards the hero at the end of the film is the wrong tank altogether? Al Murray is that someone. Try as he might, he can’t help himself. Growing up in the 1970s, Al, with the help of his dad, became fascinated with the history of World War Two.

The real revolution in the arts first took place not, as is commonly supposed, in the 1920s to the accompaniment of the Charleston, black jazz and mint juleps but more quietly and intimately, in the shadow of the windmills - artificial and real - and in the cafés and cabarets of Montmartre during the first decade of the century.

Fragile Cargo will share the as-yet-untold story of the brave people who saved China's art from the ravages of the Second World War, undertaking a perilous journey across the vast country in order to protect these fragile treasures. After the end of the war, and the beginning of the Communist regime, the Forbidden City curators were each faced with a stark choice: remain with their rescued artefacts in China, or flee with them to Taiwan. Depending on their choice, the curators' fates took startlingly different, sometimes heart-breaking turns.

Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his ground-breaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture.

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated and prolific figures in modern history. Tupac's unapologetic lyrics, for which he was villainized by many at the time, read in these pages as prophecy. His cry of outrage in a country that repeatedly told Black men and women that their lives did not matter, continues to inspire his fans around the world.

Editor in chief Alexandra Shulman kept a diary of British Vogue's centenary year. And what a year. She reveals the emotional and logistical minefield of producing the 100th anniversary issue (that Duchess of Cambridge cover surprise), organising the star-studded Vogue 100 Gala and working with designers from Victoria Beckham to Karl Lagerfeld and contributors from David Bailey to Alexa Chung, all under the continual scrutiny of a television documentary crew.

Born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, John showed an early interest newspapers when, aged 11, he wrote the Grimthorpe Street Gazette: a one-page paper detailing the latest goings-on in his street. It was a short-lived enterprise, not least as he only had one copy of it (which he charged neighbours a penny to borrow and read). It was whilst working at the Yorkshire Post that he heard of a new opening at the BBC - a move that was to change his life forever....