Books by Peter Stanfield

Exploring the explosion of the Who onto the international music scene, this heavily illustrated book looks at this furious band as an embodiment of pop art. "Ours is music with built-in hatred," said Pete Townshend. A Band with Built-In Hate pictures the Who from their inception as the Detours in the mid-sixties to the late-seventies, post-Quadrophenia. It is a story of ambition and anger, glamor and grime, viewed through the prism of pop art and the radical leveling of high and low culture that it brought about--a drama that was aggressively performed by the band. Peter Stanfield lays down a path through the British pop revolution, its attitude, and style, as it was uniquely embodied by the Who: first, under the mentorship of arch-mod Peter Meaden, as they learned their trade in the pubs and halls of suburban London; and then with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two aspiring filmmakers, at the very center of things in Soho. Guided by contemporary commentators--among them, George Melly, Lawrence Alloway, and most conspicuously Nik Cohn--Stanfield describes a band driven by belligerence and delves into what happened when Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle moved from back-room stages to international arenas, from explosive 45s to expansive concept albums. Above all, he tells of how the Who confronted their lost youth as it was echoed in punk.

A sleazy, neon- and grease-stuffed chronicle of London's 1972 music scene.

A Band with Built-In Hate portrays The Who through the prism of pop art and the levelling of high and low culture it brought about.

From The Wild Angels in 1966 until its conclusion in 1972, the cycle of outlaw motorcycle films contained forty-odd formulaic examples. Hoodlum Movies is not only about the films, its focus is on why and how these films were made, who they were made for, and how the cycle developed through the second half of the 1960s and came to a shuddering halt in 1972.

Features how the "dark continent" of blues and jazz provided Hollywood with a resonant resource to construct and negotiate the boundaries of American cultural identity. This book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, and more.

Tracing the singing cowboy's roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B M Bower, this title shows how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the 'horse opera' of the 1930s.