John Aizlewood Knihy

First, there was Joy Division. Their music reflected both the barren urban landscape of their native Manchester in the late 1970s and singer Ian Curtis's heart of darkness. They remain forever defined by both the suicide of their extraordinary and extraordinarily volatile singer and two albums as close to perfection as music can come. From the ashes of Joy Division came New Order - their globally popular music bridged the chasm between indie and dance and inspired a generation. Having conquered the world and maintained their credibility, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and imploded in a tsunami of recrimination, while still making fabulous music. It's a tale of death, destroyed friendships and bungled finances, but the story of Joy Division and New Order is also the saga of two bands who made extraordinary music which defined their times and overturned the musical landscape.

The consort of Janis Joplin and Rebecca De Mornay and one-time collaborator of Phil Spector, Leonard Cohen has for the last five years been a full-time resident of the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles where he submitted to the rigors of zazen and communal living. He was officially ordained a Buddhist monk and given the name of Jikan (Silent One). Born in Montreal in 1934, Cohen received international recognition for his second collection of poems The Spice Box of the Earth in 1961, rising to prominence in 1967 with his debut album The Songs of Leonard Cohen. His most recent album, The Future, is his eleventh. He has written two novels including the cult classic Beautiful Losers, and eight volumes of poetry. Author David Sheppard explores Cohen's fifty year odyssey through Judaic mythology, drugs, alcohol, sex, and Buddhism. What he finds is a man with a unique ability to serve up bleak but heartfelt individual truth. "Cohen has always been a man of surprises, so much so that many take him to be a man of artful disguises (as he sometimes does himself). His life has always been dangerously mythic..." -- Pico Iyer

Radiohead are not like other bands. For over three decades they have charted a singular course. As their music has become more beautiful, more strange, and more uncompromising, the band who make it have become more popular, evolving from the indie clubs of Britain to Stadia across the globe, while selling over 30 million albums. And they have done it their way. Their line-up has remained unchanged since they met at school, but these five very different characters have always remained united in their quest to keep pushing boundaries. They have changed musical direction almost as many times as they have made albums and the band who seemed destined to be one-hit-wonders when "Creep" was a global hit in the early '90s, evolved into trailblazers who have embraced rock, dance, electronica, classical music, and pop without sacrificing what makes them special. Radiohead are proof that selling records need not mean selling out and this is their story.