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Club Kids: From Speakeasies to Boombox and Beyond – Raven Smith (ed), 2008

A sparky volume on the club faces who’ve led pop'n'fashion, from ’20s flappers all the way to nu-rave and beyond. A few major lapses though: it’s a crime to give genuine visionary Leigh Bowery less space than some of the cheeky Hoxton peacocks currently recycling his ideas. Still, this is their book and if they want to portray the history of clubbing as merely a lead-up to Boombox, fairy nuff.
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Greg James

Greg James is the man who brought mixing to the UK. He came over from the US to start a residency at the Embassy Club in London, a conscious copy of New York's disco palaces, which opened in April 1978. Greg later opened Spin Offs, the influential record store in Fulham and installed many sound systems including the Warehouse in Leeds. He's a great raconteur with an ear for scandal. Here's what was left after the lawyers finished with it...

 

Where were you born?

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Danny Rampling

OK I want to take you back in time a bit. Tell me about the Ibiza trip and how that changed your life?

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White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s – Joe Boyd, 2007

As producer of the Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and many others, Boyd was right in the thick of activity in the 1960s, yet in White Bicycles remains a brilliantly detached observer of what he saw. Like a hippy Zelig, Boyd seems to have been in the right place each time a momentous event takes place, from Dylan going electric to Syd going bonkers. A classic book.
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Give The Anarchist A Cigarette – Mick Farren, 2002

Now more known as a sci-fi novelist, Farren was once vocalist with the notorious Deviants and an integral part of the 60s counterculture in London. An angry punk let loose at the heart of London’s sixties psychedelic love-in, his jaundiced view of the Summer of Love is a welcome antidote to the usual media-friendly cheerleaders. Tune in, turn on, drop out.
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