Headpress: 35 books

Hip Pocket Sleaze is an introduction to the world of vintage, lurid adult paperbacks. Charting the rise of sleazy pulp fiction during the 1960s and 1970s and reviewing many of the key titles, the book takes an informed look at the various genres and markets from this enormously prolific era, from groundbreaking...

An A-Z of eccentrics! 250 true stories of the most original and outrageous people on earth, from bad poets to transsexual evolutionary theorists this encyclopedic guide covering ancient times to the present, includes reams of material never seen in book form before. Famous eccentrics like King Ludwig,...

Beginning in the 1960s through its heyday in the 1970s and beyond, the telefilm remains an important cultural artefact masquerading as disposable entertainment. Made specifically for the small screen, within the tight constraints of broadcasting standards, what these humble movies lacked in budget and...

Power electronics is a genre of industrial or ‘noise’ music that utilises feedback and synthesizers to produce an intense, loud, challenging sound. To match this sonic excess, power electronics also relies heavily upon extreme thematic and visual content — whether in lyrics, album...

A loving look at disposable horror culture from the 1960s and 1970s. Over two glorious decades the horror film waged war on good taste, exploiting every taboo and bursting every envelope along the way. TRASHFIEND is the definitive guide to the chaotic, creative and endlessly entertaining golden age...

The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members...

The Chelsea Hotel is part of New York’s cultural fabric. It has been witness to murder, drug overdoses, suicide and scandal. In its rooms famous movies were conceived, hit songs written, and artworks created. This blistering book is a snapshot based on the diaries and notes of Joe Ambrose, written...

May 1968. Paris is awash with violence and public unrest. In a small cinema, where a surreal film is showing, another riot is taking place. Here, the enraged audience smashes up the auditorium, tear out the seats, and chase the film’s director onto the street. This is the premiere of Jean Rollin’s...

This is a fascinating overview of music's intriguing and enduring relationship with the dark side. Much of the music discussed in Gathering Of The Tribe deals with the special power of sound and tone. Frank Zappa may have said that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ but...

BLEEDING SKULL! A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey is the definitive resource on 1980s trash-horror cinema. BLEEDING SKULL! features 300 in-depth reviews of movies that have escaped the radar of people with taste and the tolerance of critics. Black Devil Doll From Hell, A Night To Dismember, Heavy Metal...

Since the earliest days of British television drama, scriptwriter Nigel Kneale has been a seminal figure. His Quatermass serials for the BBC were a seismic event in the 1950s, before finding international success when adapted by Hammer Films for the big screen. Later TV plays, such as The Road, The Stone...

For sixteen years Robert Rosen worked behind the X-rated scenes of such porn magazines as High Society, Stag, and D-Cup. In BEAVER STREET: A HISTORY OF MODERN PORNOGRAPHY, Rosen blows the lid off the lucrative and politically hounded adult industry, providing a darkly engaging account of its tumultuous...

A collection of interviews and essays on Sun Ra, his contemporaries, his records, his myth and his fan base. Composer, bandleader, pianist and space philosopher, Sun Ra was a unique individual and one of the most colorful and enduring of musical legacies, transcending time, place and culture. From...

Unlike images of sex, which were clandestine and screened only in private, images of death were made public from the onset of cinema. The father of the modern age, Thomas Edison, fed the appetite for this material with staged executions on film. Little over a century later the executions are real and...