TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here

Slaby Witness, Sleaze, the Adverts, TV Smith's Explorers, Party Line, High, Production House, Cheap... the TV Smith story is one of rock's richest, filled with some of the most exhilarating music of the past 30 years. And Your Ticket Out Of Here is the first comprehensively detailed guide to every last note of it. Well, maybe not the first. The original edition of this book was published back in 1984, within the final edition of the TV Times, the wonderfully chaotic TV Smith fanzine that I had spent the past four years producing at a rate of (almost) one a month. A second edition followed in 1990, sold through the pages of the British Punk Collector fanzine. But this update completely revises those earlier editions, while adding a complete biography, reviews, and other information. It also revises the original (somewhat confusing) format, to align it with the series of other Armchair Guides that I published through Helter Skelter Publishing a few years ago (the Cure, New Order and the Fall), and which is now relaunching in e-book format. There are some gaps, that mercifully can be filled by visiting TV's website (TVSmith.com). All the key information is here, however; the record releases, crucial/memorable live shows, and so forth, to continue a tradition that Mick Mercer, reviewing the TV Times in ZigZag, once proclaimed "a true labour of love," trailing TV "from trench to toilet and back again."