Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century - Hardcover

Something great happens in Shock and Awe: the eight-year-old enthusiastic pop-lover that Reynolds once was combines with the 53-year-old deep thinker he now is. The results are frequently giddy and wonderful. (The Observer)

A career highlight. No one has written about glam rock with such dedication, enthusiasm and ingenuity, and by dint of that, Shock And Awe will become a classic text. (GQ)

This is a wonderful celebration of - and reckoning with - a generation of chancers, chameleons and lunatic geniuses who proved, as Adam Ant later claimed, that "ridicule is nothing to be scared of". (The Guardian)

Does for glam rock what his 2006 book, Rip It Up and Start Again, did for post punk. Impeccable journalism (Mojo 4****)

This study of the elaborate and the outrageous is written with windowpane clarity and great humour. (The New Statesman)

A panoramic and appropriately dazzling history of glam (Uncut 9/10)

Reynolds has written perhaps the most incisive commentary on Bowie's career that has yet appeared (Record Collector 4****)

Shock & Awe is a carefully calibrated celebration of that most shiny, brilliant, seedy, decadent and subversive of all pop genres (Shindig 5*****) --(Shindig 5*****)

His best work yet. Beautifully researched and written this is a book that changes perceptions and sets glam in its rightful place (Louder Than War 10/10) --(Louder Than War 10/10)

A definitive, smart and celebratory account of glam (Loud and Quiet) --(Loud and Quiet)

As the sixties dream faded, a new flamboyant movement electrified the world: GLAM! In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds explores this most decadent of genres on both sides of the Atlantic. Bolan, Bowie, Suzi Quatro, Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Slade, Roxy Music, Iggy, Lou Reed, Be Bop Deluxe, David Essex -- all are represented here. Reynolds charts the retro future sounds, outrageous styles and gender-fluid sexual politics that came to define the first half of the seventies and brings it right up to date with a final chapter on glam in hip hop, Lady Gaga, and the aftershocks of David Bowie's death. Shock and Awe is a defining work and another classic in the Faber Social rock n roll canon to stand alongside Rip it Up, Electric Eden and Yeah Yeah Yeah.