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All 8 books in Dave Haslam’s acclaimed Art Decades series - SIGNED!
1. A Life in Thirty-Five Boxes - How I Survived Selling My Record Collection explores our impulse to collect, our emotional attachment to vinyl, and the notion that every record collection reflects our life story, our “passions and our pleasures. Our moments of rapture, and our moments of regret”
2. We the Youth: Keith Haring's New York Nightlife is the second book in his Art Decades series. Dave Haslam explores how the nightlife and music of rundown downtown areas of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s were formative influences on the life and art of Keith Haring.
Haslam takes us on an adventure through the clubs and venues that filled Keith Haring's nights out; spaces that offered thrills, opportunities, possibility, and a sense of community. We hear how graffiti artists and DJs became inspirations to him; we meet Madonna, the B52s, Arthur Russell, Grace Jones and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and then themid-80s AIDS epidemic changes everything...
3. Searching For Love: Courtney Love in Liverpool, 1982 At the age of 17 – before Hole, before meeting Kurt Cobain – Courtney Love took a trip to Liverpool. She describes the months she spent in the city in 1982 as ‘one of the most important things of my existence’. In ‘Searching For Love’, the third book in his Art Decades series, Dave Haslam explores the stories she’s told of her stay, talks to people who remember her, and celebrates the Liverpool music scene that attracted and inspired her
4. My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956 is the fourth book in Dave Haslam's Art Decades series. Sylvia Plath was in Paris during Easter 1956, alone in a hotel nearNotre Dame. She’d grown to love the city after spending Christmas therewith Richard Sassoon and she’d hoped he‘d be with her for Easter too,but he hadn’t answered her letters. She’d met Ted Hughes a monthearlier; Ted was also in her head, and within ten weeks they’d bemarried.
A key period in Sylvia Plath’s life, we discover how she filled those Paris days, including having dinner with an Italian communist,instigating drunken afternoon sex with a friend of a friend, sketching in the park, and lying on her yellow bed in an attic room listening to the sound of the Paris rain as she considered decisions and future plans :in her phrase, ‘the fatal dance’ of choices and alternatives
5. All You Need Is Dynamite is the fifth in the Art Decades series of small format, limited edition books. Dave Haslam explores the fading of Sixties dreams of peace and love, and the emergence of urban terrorist groups, particularly a cell known as the Angry Brigade who carried out dozens of bomb attacks in Britain.
Haslam tracks the political campaigns, the police repression, and the insane times, from underground music venues, via May '68 in Paris, to the story of Angry Brigade members living in Manchester for several months in 1971 and contributing to the underground paper Mole Express (a bible for local acid-freaks, and fans of the Edgar Broughton Band and the Weather Underground).
Picking his way through forgotten streets and demolished clubs, and the pages of underground newspapers, Haslam uncovers a heady mix of left-wing politics, psychedelic music, police raids and political violence.
6. Not All Roses is the sixth book in Dave Haslam’s acclaimed Art Decades series. In the late 1980s, Steve Cresser – aka Cressa – was hailed in i-D magazine as ‘the face of Manchester’, he went on the road with Happy Mondays, and was onstage with the Stone Roses at their big shows and their first TV appearance – even being described as ‘to all intents and purposes the fifth member of the Stone Roses’. In the mid 1990s he co-founded a band called Bad Man Wagon, became close friends with both Damien Hirst and Joe Strummer but then disappeared from view.
What happened to Cressa? He became addicted to heroin, and homeless, and was attacked and hospitalised. Haslam tells Cressa’s profoundly moving and intriguing story from the inside of the world of music and the depths of addiction.
7. Adventure Everywhere - Pablo Picasso's Paris Nightlife is the seventh book in Dave Haslam's acclaimed Art Decades series. Picasso in Paris in the 1900s was advancing the frontiers of art in a city vibrant with hedonism and creativity. Life after dark fascinated and inspired him. On the occasion of his first exhibition in Paris, a critic wrote that Picasso is an artist ‘who never believes the day is over, in a city that offers a different spectacle every minute’.
8. Strawberry and the Big Apple’ is the the eighth short-format book in his acclaimed Art Decades series, Dave Haslam explains a seemingly unlikely scenario: the day in November 1980 when Grace Jones – a spectacularly glamorous jet-setting singer living and working in Paris and New York, and recording in the Bahamas – pays a visit to Stockport (a post-industrial town seven miles south of Manchester, with crumbling infrastructure and rising unemployment). Her quest that day? To meet A Certain Ratio, a group then signed to Factory Records.
This tale of worlds colliding includes Tony Wilson’s fascination with New York; an intriguing portrait of the early life of Grace Jones; a twist in the tale, and more than a couple of mysteries; plus walk-on parts for 10cc, Robert De Niro and Jerry Hall. ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’ is the latest (and last) work in the Art Decades series by writer and former Haçienda DJ, Dave Haslam, exploring a variety of subjects rooted in cities, in recent history and lived experience, and a love for music, literature, and art.