Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth- pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdote and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Punk Diary is a comprehensive chronicle of the punk rock era, combining for the first time in one volume the previously published Punk Diary and Post Punk Diary, and expanded with new material never before published. Readers can experience this volatile period in popular music and culture firsthand, as author George Gimarc uses original archival material and in-depth interviews to present a day-by-day accounting of over 1,000 bands and 4,000 recordings, including record releases, live gigs, band breakups, riots, arrests, and revealing quotes.
The story begins with the 1970 release of the second LP by The Stooges and details the careers of well-known bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and The Clash, as well as giving credit to many smaller, often unfairly forgotten, bands who helped mold the punk revolution. Readers can make their own connections between the people and events to see who influenced whom, what was real, and what was contrived. The companion CD includes interviews with many of the book's subjects.