The Best Books We Read This Year

PUNKS LISTEN is the third in a series of ‘benefit books’ from the Hope Collective, Dublin’s punk/Do-It-Yourself Collective.

It is designed to raise funds for the Red Cross Ukraine Refugee appeal.

The new book is a collection of pieces of writing from musicians, writers, actors and music fans. They were asked to write about a record (or a gig) that was particularly significant to them. The responses make for some very interesting reading.

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This book is a treasure trove of information as well as an in-depth collector’s item, looking at The Clash’s biggest and most successful album release; it’s background stories, the studios and people involved, containing plenty of hitherto unknown insight and original colour art. Tim has written three books about The Clash; about Combat Rock (Combat Ready), Give ‘em Enough Rope (All The Peacemakers) and The Clash (First album… Move Up Starsky) and is now working on his fourth, all about Sandinista.

This limited edition all about ‘Combat Rock’ is for super-fans of The Clash and their fifth studio album, all produced as a labour of love, with plenty of extras for the readers and listeners. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about one of punk rock’s most celebrated bands, then this book is for you!

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We can be the new wind: The interaction of punk, hardcore punk, power pop and neo‐garage with alternative rock in the 1980’s.

The hardcore punk scene had two major crossovers, one with heavy metal and one with pop influenced independent rock. A significant number of early hardcore punk bands incorporated more melodic, challenging and experimental elements in their music while retaining their punk backbone and by doing so, they went on to create something new.

Alex’s first book, ‘Crossover’ focused on the the metal hardcore crosover, this massive new book focuses on the crossover of Punk, Hardcore Punk, Garage Revival and Power Pop with the Alternative Rock scene and reports on many of the main bands in the genre.

With more than 160 bands interviewed and even more reviewed, the result is a total of more than 1000 essential ‘pop-punk’ bands covered in this book. 826 pages packed with information, photos and gig flyers from all your favourite bands, and all wrappd up in original cover art by Brian Walsby – this is an essential, if not comprehensive guide, to 80’s hardcore punk.

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In a town where every day is the same…Rod is a daydreamer with a singular wish: to meet Sting, the rockstar-the only person capable of fixing Rod’s broken family and liberating him from his sheltered existence. It’s the summer before senior year, and Rod has nothing to look forward to but sitting at home day after day, serving as emotional caretaker to his mother. She’s still reeling from the passing of her firstborn son twenty years ago, a death she blames on the band Green Day. Music has been forbidden in Rod’s home ever since. 

Enter Cat, the new girl in town who’s everything Rod’s not: confident, adventurous… and Green Day’s biggest fan. When Cat presents him with the opportunity to meet his hero, will Rod risk sneaking out from under his mother’s watchful eye to New York with the girl of his dreams? Rod must decide if it’s worth jeopardising his future to save his mom’s.

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Alongside dozens of rarely seen photos from the relevant periods, and forewords from All Out War’s Mike Score and OG Terrorizer editor Nick Terry, ‘Terrorized: Volume One’ includes hundreds of old school interviews that appeared in the mag, including 100 Demons, 25 Ta Life, AFI, Agnostic Front, Amebix, Annihilator, Anthrax, Arkangel, Bad Religion, Born From Pain, Breakdown, Broken Bones, Candlemass, Cannibal Corpse, Cause For Alarm, Chaos UK, Congress, Converge, Cro-Mags, Crowbar, The Damned, Danzig, Death Angel, Decapitated, Destruction, Discharge, Disfear, DOA, Down By Law, Dub War, earthtone9, Earth Crisis, Excel, Exodus, Extinction of Mankind, Extreme Noise Terror, Face Down, Freebase, The Fiend, Floodgate, Gama Bomb, Gorefest, The Great Deceiver, Grip Inc., Guttermouth, H2O, Hades, Hatebreed, The Haunted, Hirax, Hypocrisy, Icons of Filth, Ignite, Immolation, Integrity, and many, many more.

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Terrorizer was the world’s leading extreme music publication from its launch in 1993 to its untimely demise in 2018. Ian Glasper was one of the few constants during the magazine’s twenty-five year reign of terror, and their main correspondent for punk, hardcore and thrash metal (not to mention the occasional death metal band and other surprises along the way), and here – for the very first time – he has collected every single interview of his that ever ran, and even a few that didn’t.

Alongside dozens of rarely seen photos from the relevant periods, and forewords from Therapy?’s Michael McKeegan and OG Terrorizer editor Jonathan Selzer, ‘Terrorized: Volume Two’ includes hundreds of old school interviews that appeared in the mag, including Killing Joke, Killswitch Engage, Knuckledust, Kreator, Liar, Life of Agony, Madball, Malevolent Creation, Medulla Nocte, Megadeth, Merauder, Meshuggah, Millencolin, Misfits, Municipal Waste, Murphy’s Law, Napalm Death, Nasty Savage, NoMeansNo, No Redeeming Social Value, NOFX, Nuclear Assault, Obituary, Offspring, Onslaught, Overkill, Pennywise, Peter And The Test Tube Babies, Power Trip, Prong, Raging Speedhorn, RKL, S.O.D., Sacred Reich, Sacrilege, Sepultura, Sheer Terror, Shelter, Sick Of It All, Six Feet Under, Slapshot, Slayer, Slipknot, Snapcase, SNFU, Sodom, Strife, Suffocation, System Of A Down, Terror, Testament, Therapy?, Throwdown, Total Chaos, Toxic Holocaust, Trivium, TSOL, Unleashed, Vader, Vektor, Vital Remains, Warzone, Witchery, Withdrawn, Your Demise and many, many more.

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