Series:

Mammoth Books

4 total works

Cover of The Mammoth Book of Freddie Mercury and Queen
There has never been a band quite like Queen, and it's hard to imagine that there will be again. While a number of groups may have had a go at rock, prog rock, opera, funk, pop, and twenties pastiche, few, if any, have done so on a single album. Unusually, not just one or two, but every member of the band was a great songwriter. And while bands like ELO may have made similar use of layered harmonies, Queen were emphatically the pioneers of this vocal style. From the stadium anthem 'We Will Rock You' to the Fifties retro of 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' and the slick synth-pop of 'I Want to Break Free' to the unlikeliest Number One ever, the category-defying 'Bohemian Rhapsody', with its unlikely blend of strutting rock and operatic intrigue, Queen was truly a band like no other. Egan, as he has done so successfully in Mammoth Books on The Beatles, Bob Dylan and, most recently, The Rolling Stones presents a bumper selection of writing, both old and new on Mercury, bassist John Deacon, guitarist Brian May, and drummer Roger Taylor: features, interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces to created a rounded portrait of one of history's most remarkable groups.

Cover of The Mammoth Book of the Rolling Stones
This is a bumper collection of writing in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of 'the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world', from John Pidgeon's first encounter with The Rolling Stones at the The Ricky Tick Club in 1963 and Norman Jopling's seminal article in the New Record Mirror that same year, to 'Please Allow Me to Correct a Few Things', and a 2010 interview with Bill Wyman. Egan also draws on previously unpublished material from interviews with former Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and the band's recording engineers.

Cover of The Mammoth Book of the Beatles

The Mammoth Book of the Beatles

by Sean Egan

Published 23 April 2009

Over 30 landmark interviews, accounts, and memoirs of The Beatles and their entourage, recording how they inadvertently became counter-culture's figureheads and changed society.

The pieces include Paul Johnson's 'The Menace of Beatlism', Maureen Cleave's 'Beatles Bigger than Christ' feature, the News of the World feature suggesting The Beatles were spent forces - just before they unleashed Sergeant Pepper on the world - interviews with their entourage and main loves; plus latter-day contributions from the likes of Paul Gambacinni, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus.

Also included is a chronological tracing of each Beatles album and single, and analysis of all Beatles movie releases and television appearances.

Cover of The Mammoth Book of Bob Dylan

The Mammoth Book of Bob Dylan

by Sean Egan

Published 20 November 2005
The importance of Bob Dylan to the history of popular music is incalculable. He transformed folk music from anodyne crooning into a vehicle for coruscating contemporary social protest. Within a couple of years he had transformed rock 'n' roll, too, bringing the intellectualism of folk lyrics to a genre still dominated by moon-in-June romantic convention. The phenomenal commercial success of his 1965 epic, gritty and streetwise single "Like a Rolling Stone" together with the dazzling lyrical technique of "Highway 61 Revisited" established him forever as the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. Egan presents a selection of the best writing on Dylan drawn from across the decades, interspersed with new narrative, record reviews, essays and interviews.