Dylan Jones

This is a witty, stylish and indispensable guide to being a modern man. It is tough being a man in the twenty-first century. First there are the big dilemmas, like how to get a pay rise and how to suck up to your boss. Then there are the minor irritations: how do you beat jet-lag, and how do you stop your trousers sliding off their hangers? And finally there are all those things you ought to know, but don't: how to jump-start a car, how to buy lingerie, how to stop smoking, how to tie a Windsor Knot, how to behave at a lap-dancing club ...the list is endless. Fear not. In "Mr Jones Rules", the highly respected editor of "GQ" magazine draws on his wealth of experience to give the final answer to these questions and more. It will be the must-have present for every husband, boyfriend and son this Christmas.

Its just another song to me. Ive written 1,000 of them and its really just another one. Jimmy Webb When I heard it I cried. It made me cry because I was homesick. Its just a masterfully written song. Glen CampbellThe sound of Wichita Lineman was the sound of ecstatic solitude, but then its hero was the quintessential loner. What a great metaphor he was: a man who needed a woman more than he actually wanted her. Written in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, Wichita Lineman is the first philosophical country song: a heartbreaking torch ballad still celebrated for its mercurial songwriting genius fifty years later. It was recorded by Glen Campbell in LA with a legendary group of musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and something about the songs enigmatic mood seemed to capture the tensions in America at a moment of crisis. Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo guitar and Campbells plaintive vocals, Webbs paean to the American West describes a telephone linemans longing for an absent lover, who he hears singing in the wire - and like all good love songs, its an SOS from the heart. Mixing close-listening, interviews and travelogue, Dylan Jones explores the legacy of a record that has entertained and haunted millions for over half a century. What is it about this song that continues to seduce listeners, and how did the parallel stories of Campbell and Webb - songwriters and recording artists from different ends of the spectrum - unfold in the decades following? Part biography, part work of musicological archaeology, TheWichita Lineman opens a window on to America in the late-twentieth century through the prism of a song that has been covered by myriad artists in the intervening decades.Americana in the truest sense: evocative and real. Bob Stanley

A witty, stylish and indispensable guide to being a modern man. It is tough being a man in the twenty-first century. First there are the big dilemmas, like how to get a pay rise and how to suck up to your boss. Then there are the minor irritations: how do you beat jet-lag, and how do you stop your trousers sliding off their hangers? And finally there are all those things you ought to know, but dont: how to jump-start a car, how to buy lingerie, how to stop smoking, how to tie a Windsor Knot, how to behave at a lap-dancing club ... the list is endless. Fear not. In Mr Jones Rules, the highly respected editor of GQ magazine, draws on his wealth of experience to give the final answer to these questions and more. It will be the must-have present for every husband, boyfriend and son this Christmas.

David Bowie. Culture Club. Wham!. Soft Cell. Duran Duran. Sade. Adam Ant. Spandau Ballet. The Eurythmics.ExcellentGuardian Hugely enjoyableIrish Times DazzlingLRB FascinatingNew Statesman An absolute must-readGQ One of the most creative entrepreneurial periods since the Sixties, the era of the New Romantics grew out of the remnants of post-punk and developed quickly alongside club culture, ska, electronica, and goth. The scene had a huge influence on the growth of print and broadcast media, and was arguably one of the most bohemian environments of the late twentieth century. Not only did it visually define the decade, it was the catalyst for the Second British Invasion, when the US charts would be colonised by British pop music - making it one of the most powerful cultural exports since the Beatles.In Sweet Dreams, Dylan Jones charts the rise of the New Romantics through testimony from the people who lived it.For a while, Sweet Dreams were made of this.

A witty, stylish and indispensable guide to being a modern man. It is tough being a man in the twenty-first century. First there are the big dilemmas, like how to get a pay rise and how to suck up to your boss. Then there are the minor irritations: how do you beat jet-lag, and how do you stop your trousers sliding off their hangers? And finally there are all those things you ought to know, but don t: how to jump-start a car, how to buy lingerie, how to stop smoking, how to tie a Windsor Knot, how to behave at a lap-dancing club ... the list is endless.Fear not. In Mr Jones Rules, the highly respected editor of GQ magazine draws on his wealth of experience to give the final answer to these questions and more. It will be the must-have present for every husband, boyfriend and son this Christmas.

A wholly successful endeavour carried along by waves of infectious enthusiasmMojoFascinatingNew StatesmanThe 80s were about big ideas writ large - new money, new style, gender fluidity, gay pride, attritional politics, the special relationship, nuclear fear, AIDS, cocaine, ecstasy, tabloid royalty, the rise of urban pop, and ultimately geopolitical chaos. Dylan Jones history of the decade in pop frames the 80s through some of its most important and popular hits, choosing records which either epitomised their time, or ushered in a new cultural shift. So we move seamlessly from Rappers Delight and the genre defining moment of hip hop into The Specials spectral, Ghost Town; from ABC and the apotheosis of New Pop (The Look of Love) to Madonnas breakthrough moment with Like a Virgin, and so on.Subjective and idiosyncratic, Shiny and New takes us from downtown New York to post-industrial Manchester, in the first widescreen attempt to weave together the stories, the songs and events that re-shaped music and society.

Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emins tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Browns Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). It was the year of The Bends, the year Danny Boyle started filming Trainspotting, the year Richey Edwards went missing, the year Alex Garland wrote The Beach, the year Blair changed Clause IV after a controversial vote at the Labour Conference. It was a period of huge cultural upheaval - in art, literature, publishing and drugs, and a period of almost unparalleled hedonism.Faster Than a Cannonball is a cultural swipe of the decade from loungecore to the rise of New Labour, teasing all the relevant artistic strands through interviews with all the major protagonists and exhaustive re-evaluations of the important records of the year, by artists including Radiohead, Teenage Fanclub, Tricky, Pulp, Blur, the Chemical Brothers, Supergrass, Elastica, Spiritualized, Aphex Twin and, of course, Oasis.

Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen whether it be the 1960s of the 2020s, The Velvet Underground represent ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang, around a psychedelic rock and roll band - a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhols Factory - The Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up; they never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and in the process invented the archetype. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. Dylan Jones definitive oral history of The Velvet Underground draws on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, film-makers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, to celebrate not only their impact but their legacy, which burns brighter than ever into the 21st century.

One Day: Saturday 13 July 1985, nearly two billion people woke up with one purpose. Nearly a third of humanity knew where they were going to be that day. Watching, listening to, attending: Live Aid. One Decade: Britain in the Eighties was different. The culture was different, the politics were different, and our engagement with the world was different. And it was just one day in 1985 that showed how different it was.In One Day, One Decade Dylan Jones tells the story of the Eighties through that day at Wembley, sweeping backwards to the end of the Seventies, and forward to the start of the Nineties. It draws on his personal reminiscences and perspective of music, media, fashion, politics and all forms of pop culture to frame the decade.This is a big book but not a exhaustive and dry social history. Live Aid was the decades pinch point, when a nations attitudes and expectations were somehow captured and changed forever. The author suggests that before Live Aid, Britain was one place, and after Live Aid it was another.Britain in the Eighties was a juxtaposition of militancy and profligacy, a country where industry was being broken down, societies were being demolished, and unemployment became an inevitable lifestyle choice: yet the Eighties was also the apotheosis of pop culture, a decade where entertainment, opinion and subjectivity were more important than ever before.Dylan Jones was at the heart of the 1980s editing the seminal magazines i-D and The Face. He was one of the Blitz Kids and was both a commentator and one of the style-makers of the time. This is a controversial book, a story told from the inside by one who was at the centre of events.

And then there was David Bowie, the uber-freak with the mismatched pupils, the low-tech space face from the planet Sparkle. This was Bowies third appearance on TOTP but this was the one that properly resonated with its audience, the one that would go on to cause a seismic shift in the Zeitgeist. This is the performance that turned Bowie into a star, embedding his Ziggy Stardust persona into the nations consciousness. With a tall, flame-orange cockade quiff (stolen from a Kansai Yamamoto model on the cover of Honey), lavishly applied make-up, white nail polish, and wearing a multi-coloured jump-suit that looked as though it were made from fluorescent fish skin (chosen by Ziggy co-shaper, the designer Freddie Buretti), and carrying a brand spanking new, blue acoustic guitar, a bone-thin Bowie appeared not so much as a pop singer, but rather as some sort of benevolent alien, a concept helped along by the provocative appearance of his guitarist, the chicken-headed Mick Ronson, with both of them unapologetically sporting knee-length patent leather wrestlers boots (Bowies were red). Most people are scared of colour, Bowie said later. Their lives are built up in shades of grey. It doesnt matter how straight the style is, make it brightly coloured material and everyone starts acting weird.Suddenly Bowie - a man called alias - had the world at his nail-varnished fingertips, and in no time at all he would be the biggest star in the world.

** Shortlisted for the NME Best Music Book Award 2018 **THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEARA HERALD BOOK OF THE YEARAN IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEARThe definitive book on BowieThe TimesDrawn from a series of conversations between David Bowie and Dylan Jones across three decades, together with over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators - some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie - this oral history is an intimate portrait of a remarkable rise to stardom and one of the most fascinating lives of our time.Profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, Bowie was a man of intense relationships that often came to abrupt ends. He was a social creature, equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra, and in Dylan Joness telling - by turns insightful and salacious - we see as intimate a portrait as could possibly be drawn.Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Joness interviews with him across three decades, DAVID BOWIE is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time.***NOW REVISED AND EXPANDED***

Few people can say they have shaped the cultural landscape of the last four decades while crossing paths with some of the most extraordinary personalities on the planet. But then, of course, Dylan Jones isnt just anyone.These Foolish Things captivatingly charts Dylans life: from his peripatetic childhood and late adolescence in 1970s London - a city then alive with possibility - to his award-winning tenure at what would become one of the most dynamic magazines of its era, GQ. It details how he came to be in that hot seat: a journey through the Swinging London slipstreams of punk and new romanticism, and through i-D, The Face and Arena, which created the platform on which GQ was based, with Dylan as a common denominator.Littered with a gold-star cast of characters - including a whos who of celebrity from David Bowie and Bryan Ferry to Alastair Campbell and Prince Charles, via Samuel L. Jackson, Piers Morgan and Rihanna - this memoir reflects on how GQ became an established style and how Dylan sought to stir up music, politics and fashion.Witty, perceptive and deliciously entertaining, but by turns bravely vulnerable, These Foolish Things is a memoir like no other: a dazzling retelling of the start of the twenty-first century from one of the worlds most fascinating media giants.

Natalie Vine, one of Britains top forensic psychiatrists, spends every day trying to get inside the heads of some of the most violent criminals imaginable. Its lonely, harrowing work, but perhaps it helps her deal with the demons of her past.Locked in the mind of Thomas Meredith are terrible visions of how a serial killer tortured and murdered his girlfriend, in front of his very eyes, a year earlier. Once a doctor, Meredith has become a recluse who only emerges from his isolated home to work the graveyard shift in a local motorway cafe. Natalie Vine is the one person with the ability and empathy to make Meredith open up, to bring to the surface the horror that he has buried so deeply. And she must succeed, no matter how much pain it causes.For Meredith is the only living witness to this murderers actions, and he has started killing again...