A thrilling, inspirational read.

Set the template for a whole new style of rock journalism, informed, irreverent, passionate and polemical.

The best writer about pop music...an inspiration.

The book to read if you want to get some idea of the original primal energy of pop music. Loads of unfounded, biased assertions that almost always turn out to be right. Absolutely essential.

Cohn was the first writer authentically to capture the raucous vitality of pop music

The defining text of what its subtitle calls ''the Golden Age of Rock.'' Spun out in a series of perfectly turned, pocket-size biographies -- Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Who -- it is the closest thing there is to a rock version of Vasari's ''Lives of the Artists.'' It is a book full of attitude, shrewd (and sometimes cruel) judgments, youthful cynicism and aching love

The first best book on rock 'n' roll and still the best first book to read.

Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate -- and cool

Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song...A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band I’ve ever seen

Britain’s great lost punk band

So colourful, so comical, so damn bitchy... hilarious

Matheson writes with the jagged verve he once sought from his band.

Biographical subject and author have found their perfect match.

One Man Band rumbles along… Welles in his middle years is a more engaging prospect than most artists at a similar point. He has been lucky to have Callow as a biographer, balancing warmth with skepticism, fondness with reproof.

This richly detailed and revelatory biography presents the most frank and intimate portrait yet of Ray Davies

Rogan does an excellent job of trying to work out what makes The Kinks’ enigmatic frontman tick whilst charting the tumultuous career of a band whose idiosyncratic but brilliant hits are currently enjoying a renaissance

This book is a good, solid, factually based read throughout… I imagine nearing six decades of recording history to be squeezed into one book is a task beyond the scope of a lot of authors, but this has been done rather well by Johnny Rogan… Excellent and complex.

An engaging and very accessible history book about our modern artistic achievements that, provocatively, also debunks some of the very icons it praises.