
Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany
A history of krautrock that refuses to separate the records from the country that produced them
Enter the Reading Room →Step inside a shelf-lined archive of progressive rock, psychedelia, krautrock, electronic music, album art and the culture surrounding the records.
Browse all 100 books ↓One hundred editorial guides, arranged as a compact private-library catalogue.

A history of krautrock that refuses to separate the records from the country that produced them
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The Can book that is part biography, part archive and part continuation of the band's own method
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The tiny book that became part of krautrock history itself
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Not a starter book: a tunnel system
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A broad, generous history of British prog that remembers the genre was bigger than four stadium bands
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Prog history for readers who want to see the spectacle as well as read about it
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A compact narrative of how prog became enormous, ridiculous to its enemies, and impossible to kill
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The prog book for readers who want to argue about what "progressive" actually means
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The King Crimson biography that had to grow with the band
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A Yes biography written by a journalist who watched the band become Yes
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Genesis tell their own story, which is both the attraction and the caveat
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Steve Hackett's Genesis story is quieter than rock mythology, and that is precisely its value
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Peter Gabriel after Genesis is not an epilogue
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Brian Eno is less a conventional career than a network of connected methods
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Roxy Music proposed a different idea of what a rock band could contain
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Pink Floyd from the drum stool, with fewer thunderbolts than the mythology suggests
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The Pink Floyd biography to read when one band member's memory is not enough
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A Pink Floyd biography whose age is part of its value
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Recovering Syd Barrett from the cautionary tale built around him
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Psychedelia is a cultural environment, not a checklist of effects
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The 1960s occult underground, where flower power meets much stranger weather
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LSD history before it became part of the psychedelic-rock scenery
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The psychedelic revolution as an American collision between science, mysticism and mass culture
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The Summer of Love makes more sense when the neighbourhood becomes a place again
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The psychedelic 1960s written before anybody knew how the decade would end
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Seven hundred pages is not excessive when the band became its own ecosystem
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The biography that helped turn Jim Morrison from dead singer into permanent rock myth
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The Doors story told by the man at the organ and one of Morrison's most committed believers
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The Doors memoir least interested in pretending the ride was harmless
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Arthur Lee's life is far messier than the perfection attached to *Forever Changes*
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Hendrix as a human being before he became the electric-guitar logo
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A Hendrix book interested less in the itinerary than in the consequences
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A Hendrix biography with a publishing history almost as important as its argument
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One producer walking through an implausible number of 1960s crossroads
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British folk music treated as a machine for inventing the past and imagining the future
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Folk-rock leaves the coffeehouse and becomes several different futures at once
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How folk musicians plugged in and accidentally rearranged popular music
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The dream turns into a very profitable corporation
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A rock history where the main character is a neighbourhood
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Laurel Canyon in voices, photographs and physical memory
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The Beatles catalogue turned into a map of the 1960s
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The Beatles biography that spends nearly a thousand pages reaching 1962, and makes the decision feel rational
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The Beatles book you open because somebody asks what happened at EMI on a particular Tuesday
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The Beatles tell the Beatles story, including the Beatle who could no longer be interviewed
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Paul McCartney's version of the 1960s, shaped through hundreds of hours of conversation
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Abbey Road remembered from behind the console, with one enormous caveat: memory is not a tape log
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George Martin before he became a synonym for "the fifth Beatle"
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Keith Richards writes the Keith Richards story, then spends hundreds of pages complicating the cartoon
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The quiet Rolling Stone had been keeping receipts
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The Stones answer back collectively
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Pete Townshend turns the identity question back on himself
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The Who from the man whose job was to make Townshend's ideas physical
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Ten years inside Keith Moon's orbit, where the anecdote stops being harmless
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Ray Davies makes himself an unreliable character in his own autobiography
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The Kinks biography built from people who rarely agree on the same Kinks
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Bowie biography before Bowie's final act
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Bowie reconstructed as a room full of people who cannot agree about him
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The Bowie book you do not finish so much as install
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The closest thing Bowie published to an autobiography is a giant book about Ziggy
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Glam's artificiality is not an escape from meaning; it is the argument
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The Ziggy Stardust book that asks where the alien came from before he landed
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A Roxy Music history that reaches its destination almost exactly when the band begins
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The Bowie biography that had to keep changing because Bowie did
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Lou Reed's biography keeps changing shape because Lou Reed kept resisting the shape audiences preferred
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Punk history told by a room full of people who rarely agree about who invented anything
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The Beatles studio book that rebuilds the laboratory instead of retelling the legend
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Fifteen American studios treated as instruments with addresses
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Thirty-seven producers explain why "producer" is not one job
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Abbey Road is only the front door to British recording history
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The synthesizer was not invented once; people negotiated what the instrument would become
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The synth book from the moment when "vintage" still meant somebody might remember buying it new
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A synthesizer history that eventually expects you to stop reading and make a patch
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A church-organ alternative becomes one of jazz, soul and rock's most physical instruments
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Beatles history retold through the objects they actually held
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Six hundred and seventy-two pages proving that "Keith Richards plays a Telecaster" explains almost nothing
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Twelve landmark guitars, one century of people discovering that electricity makes excellent trouble
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Two very different men become shorthand for two guitar families rock never stops comparing
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A broken guitar turns one musician into an accidental historian
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A coffee-table book from the era when a record sleeve was nearly the size of the coffee table
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Roger Dean's first major monograph proves that album covers were only one part of the world he was designing
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Hipgnosis finally gets the kind of catalogue normally reserved for museums
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The Hipgnosis book that shows how an impossible-looking image was made before it became inevitable
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Pink Floyd's visual history from the designer who repeatedly turned abstract ideas into physical problems
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The book had to change title because Barney Bubbles became larger than the first edition could contain
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An album-cover history organised by what images do rather than when designers did them
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A top-hundred list that is useful precisely because nobody can prove it is right
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Punk becomes more interesting when somebody explains the country that needed it
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Punk's most radical consequence was that musicians stopped obeying punk
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Thirteen bands explain how "alternative rock" existed for a decade before the mainstream discovered the label
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Lester Bangs is useful because he reminds music writing that a mind should be visible behind the information
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A rock book that asks what kind of country can be heard inside a record
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Rock history written while the canon was still molten
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Eight hundred pages devoted to the cultural machinery behind a three-minute single
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Bill Graham's instrument was the event
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Woodstock becomes more interesting when the symbol is unfolded back into a timetable
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The festival book for readers who have moved past the lineup poster
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The Led Zeppelin biography that became part of Led Zeppelin mythology
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The Led Zeppelin biography to read after *Hammer of the Gods* when you want the case reopened
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Bob Dylan writes a memoir and declines the obvious route through his own monuments
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Eight hundred pages devoted to a musician whose method depends on refusing to stay pinned down
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