Hell Fire Books are currently working with…
Maggie Abbott & Marijane Miller
Seeking Hazardous Adventures: A British Girl Takes On A Man’s World In Hollywood
TINSELTOWN Adventures SOUGHT
- Who befriended Peter Sellers on the cusp of international stardom in Rome?
- Who secured Mick Jagger the leading role in Performance?
- Who realised her friend David Bowie would be perfect as The Man Who Fell To Earth?
- Who worked tirelessly with Martin Sheen to ensure he landed the lead role in the legendary Apocalypse Now?
- And who thrived in Hollywood’s intensely male environment during the seventies and eighties?
All this and more can be found in Hollywood agent/executive Maggie Abbott’s memoir – as she moves from London’s East End and life as a wartime evacuee to the heart of Hollywood via Rome’s Hollywood on the Tiber, New York’s leading literary circles and 1960s Swinging London, navigating her way through the male dominated executive offices of the music and film industries to the heart of the entertainment industry.
Maggie Abbott
Londoner, Maggie Abbott accidentally fell into the movie business when she was employed by the William Morris Agency in Rome.
Acquiring a knack for being in the most interesting places at the best of times, Maggie’s friendships with Gore Vidal and George Plimpton saw her working in New York’s vibrant literary circles during the early sixties, assisting director Henry Kaplan on two Broadway plays and finally returning to London to work alongside Kenneth Tynan at The National Theatre just as the Swinging Sixties burst into life.
Maggie next joined Creative Management Associates, the prestigious talent agency, and spent ten years representing such major stars as Charlotte Rampling, Mick Jagger and David Bowie. In Los Angeles she was the agent for Martin Sheen, Maria Schneider and Peter O’Toole, before experiencing life as a studio executive at Columbia Pictures.
Marijane Miller
Marijane Miller has over 25 years’ experience in network television, online video and feature documentary production. Her strong background in informational and educational content includes Emmy-winning children’s programming for network and public television.
Marijane has created documentary content for national non-profit organisation websites as well as online video/informational solutions for national brands.
She more recently wrote, produced and directed two feature documentaries and currently writes weekly video news reports for the non-profit InvisiblePeople.tv.
Stuart Bailie
Trouble Songs: Music & Conflict In Northern Ireland
Inflammable material
Trouble Songs presents the previously untold history of music and conflict in Northern Ireland, commencing in 1968 and bringing the story right up-to-date with Kneecap.
Musicians from the punk, folk, rave and rock worlds have all responded to the violence, bigotry and shocking events that occurred in Northern Ireland, which has resulted in a remarkable collection of songs by artists as wide-ranging as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Sinead O’Connor, The Pogues, The Cranberries and Elvis Costello.
Featuring contributions from a who’s who of Irish music, the 60 plus interviewees include Bono, Christy Moore, The Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Orbital, Kevin Rowland, Terri Hooley, The Rubberbandits and The Miami Showband survivors. Trouble Songs is part music history, part social history, examining the conflict from a unique perspective and highlighting the power of music as a persuader, agitator and peacemaker.
Stuart Bailie
Stuart is a Belfast-based music journalist and author who has been active in the music industry for 40 years. His work has appeared in NME (where he was Assistant Editor), Mojo, Uncut, Q, Vox, Classic Rock, Hot Press and The Irish Times.
Across his career, Stuart has shared unforgettable encounters with Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan, Nina Simone, Björk, Sinéad O’Connor, and Dave Grohl, while documenting the rise of Radiohead, the chaos of Oasis, the road fever of Primal Scream and U2, and the pain and transcendence of the Manic Street Preachers. He also wrote and narrated the BBC documentary So Hard To Beat and co-founded the Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast, where he served as its CEO from 2008 to 2016. Stuart currently edits Dig With It, a publication celebrating music, arts, and counterculture in Northern Ireland.
Malcolm Bennett & Aidan Hughes
The Complete BRUTE!
NOT AVAILABLE IN PUBLIC LIBRARIES
Unique in the annals of modern literature, unrivalled in the civilised world, BRUTE! is an unparalleled exercise in minimalist hard-boiled narrative. Candid sagas of ‘two-fisted action’ and‘sheath-bursting romance’ so real and raw they explode off the page. Wild, untameable women and colossal, work-hardened men grapple in savage unbridled passion. The BRUTE! style spans every genre and straddles the whole gamut of human emotions.
Written and illustrated by Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes, BRUTE! lampoons several literary conventions in short, concise bursts of ‘WOODSPEAK!’ – a phonetic language based on sound, comprised of a number of elements, namely Spikespeak, Forcephrase and Powerphrase. Brutal strings of sharp, staccato word sounds forced together into narrative’. A technique derived from tabloid headlines and pulp novels.
Originally, only seven issues of the pamphlet BRUTE! were published (1984-88). However, it quickly became a cult favourite and spawned an animated TV series, a Sphere Books paperback and strips in Blitz magazine and the London Evening Standard.Aidan & Malcolm crack with the funnies at a BRUTE! book signing.
The Complete BRUTE! contains fistfuls of stories featuring cowboys, hooligans, pig farmers, Romans, sailors and squaddies and will not be available in public libraries until each one contains a bar.
The rest, as they say, will be history.
“A pocket riot bible of screaming bold text and black & white prints that sets itself apart from everything else. I loved it!” – James Brown, Creator of Loaded
“The best experimental novel this decade” – Kazuo Ishiguro
“Masterly…” – The Literary Review
Malcolm Bennett
Sadly, Malcolm passed away in March 2015, of unknown but unsurprising causes. While his post-BRUTE! years were punctuated by pubs, drugs and prison, by the turn of the century he had cleaned up and started a new life in London. He told few about his previous life on TV, radio and page, yet he couldn’t shed the contrarian charisma that would establish him as a racontrepreneur in his stomping ground of The Borough, south east London.
Malcolm began writing and performing again, enjoying a revival around 2010, when the discovery of previously unpublished BRUTE! stories led to the release of I, Brute! in 2010. He published small runs of new material in the following years and was looking forward to the future when he went and fucking died. He is still painfully missed.
Aidan Hughes
When Aidan and Malcolm went their separate ways, Aidan continued to work successfully as a commercial illustrator, as he does to this day. His dramatic high contrast artwork would translate easily to advertising and animation, even if clients like Guinness and Bank of Scotland required fewer murderous, bloke-poking, pub heroes.
Aidan also produced several large scale outdoor murals in England, France, Italy and the Czech Republic. But perhaps Aidan is best known for the album covers he designed for Massive Attack and the German industrial band KMFDM, featuring the unmistakable style that runs through his body of work. He currently lives, works and has a great time in the Czech Republic.
OFFICIAL!
The Complete Brute! Is once again available to licence. Details upon request. You lucky, lucky people…
Andy Blade
Outside View: The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker
The inside track
With Outside View: The Secret Life Of A Teenage Punk Rocker, Andy Blade provides a vivid insight into the London punk scene from someone who was there.
He was the singer in Eater – a London punk band of the mid-1970s – and one of the youngest, if not the youngest, bands on the scene. Totally inspired by the most exciting band ever, the Sex Pistols, they typified the tidal wave of DIY ambition making the rules up as they went along. And what fun they had too.
This is the punk scene – cheap drugs, gobbing, sexy punkettes – and then eighteen months later it was all over and Eater had split up. WHAM! BAM! ALAKAZAM! Knocked out, loaded, and sideways. Andy describes his ‘mid-life crisis’ at 18 and his subsequent onwards and upwards new adventures with equal dark humour.
It’s clear from reading this wonderful book that Andy remains a punk at heart despite now working as a part-time teacher. You have to read this book. This book is bloody brilliant. Andy is painfully honest, has numerous great anecdotes and it’s also very funny.
Do yourself a favour and read it!
ANDY BLADE
Andy Blade (born Andrew Radwan in London, to an Egyptian father and an English mother) was the front man of Eater – a first wave punk band formed in 1976 by four high school friends from Finchley, North London.
Too cool for school, Eater appeared on the seminal 1977 Live At The Roxy, London WC2 album, performing a version of Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen with the title changed to Fifteen to reflect their schoolboy status.
Eater’s sound has been characterised as ‘run-of-the-mill dole queue punk rock’ and ‘basic boy-ish punk rock’, but are now recognised and regarded as a major influence on Green Day, Dinosaur Jnr. and Ash.
The band’s second single, Thinking Of The USA (originally released in June 1977), was included in Mojo magazine’s list of the best punk rock singles of all time. Andy has recently had to issue a cease and desist demand on Donald Trump to get him to stop using it on his hustings. Punk or what?
Andy subsequently became a hippy, and then a school teacher, and now he’s back in the game as a musician, writer, podcaster, and performer – under his own name and occasionally as Eater.
Dennis DiBrizzi
Life On The Road: Days & Nights With Mott The Hoople ‘74 & Ian Hunter
you look like a star –
but you’re out on parole
Life On The Road: Days & Nights With Mott The Hoople ‘74 & Ian Hunter. A magnificent collection of personal photographs by keyboard player Dennis DiBrizzi – a member of both Ian Hunter’s Rant Band and MOTT ‘74. This volume includes over 150 previously unseen images – on stage, on the road and behind the scenes – and is supplemented throughout by personal reminisces from Ian Hunter, members of both Mott ‘74 and the Rant Band, and the road crew.
As Dennis says, “As the keyboard player I had the access to my bandmates and the experiences we shared on stage, in the dressing rooms, hotels, and various motorway services, and truck stops. I also had the most important thing, the trust of my travel companions to document our time together. I think these photos show that trust, the camaraderie, and the respect.”
This is a book no one else could have created.
Dennis DiBrizzi
Dennis was born in Yonkers, NY. He’s toured with Mott The Hoople, as well as Ian Hunter and The Rant Band. His other touring and recording credits include Dion, Genya Ravan, Gary “US” Bonds, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and The Raiders, Lou Christie, Mitch Ryder, Chris Pati and Bluefire. As well as a talented keyboard player, Dennis is also a photographer, specialising in black and white photography. His work has appeared on numerous albums and in Rock ‘n’ Roll Sweepstakes: The Authorised Biography of Ian Hunter.
Malcolm Garrett & Richard Boon
Buzzcocks Productivity
packagING THE PERFECT POP
Untapping and wrapping Buzzcocks the Malcolm Garrett and Richard Boon way.
“We wanted to set Buzzcocks apart from this punk look, which merely exploited a style that was already proving clichéd and consequently locked in time…”
Buzzcocks Productivity. is the collected and catalogued compendium of the designs produced for the group by Malcolm Garrett, in conjunction with the band’s first manager, Richard Boon. The architect and the town planner, if you will.
This high-end, top-notch, glossy edition gathers together in one place all of the imagery that accompanied Buzzcocks’ recorded output from the initial ground-breaking and self-funded, ‘Spiral Scratch’, through the ever-present, chart-busting years of 1977 to 1980 while signed to the United Artists record label, and onto the reformation coda from 1993.
At its heart the book not only features all the record sleeve designs but also the extensions of the designs into and across the promotional, publicity and marketing campaigns – featuring fly posters, press adverts, tour merchandise, promo badges and other associated ephemera.
The book will be annotated by Malcolm and Richard, who explain their thinking and execution of the designs in question, with additional commentary and anecdotes from associates and collaborators, such as Linder Sterling (illustrator of the distinctive ‘Orgasm Addict’ image); Jon Savage (creator of the fanzine ‘The Secret Public’); photographers Jill Furmanovsky, Chris Gabrin and Kevin Cummins, and A&R man and United Artists record label executive, Andrew Lauder, who signed the band and steered their rise up the pop charts alongside producer Martin Rushent.
Additional contextual essays outlining the prevailing moods, mores and mindsets of the times, supported by press clippings and photographs, will pepper the visual narrative.
This first time comprehensive collection of the visual language of Buzzcocks is a must-have for every Buzzcocks fan across the seven seas and seven continents.
Malcolm Garrett
Malcolm came to prominence in the late 70s and early 80s through his work for music artists such as Buzzcocks, Magazine, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Simple Minds, Heaven 17 and Peter Gabriel. He was an early convert to exploring the opportunities and challenges of design with digital technology, and his London studio, Assorted iMaGes, was amongst the first of its peers to go totally digital in 1990.
Garrett was born in Northwich, England in 1956, and attended St Ambrose College in Hale Barns. He studied typography at the University of Reading from 1974 until 1975 and graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975 until 1978.
His first notable work was design for the punk rock group Buzzcocks, including the iconic cover for their 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’.
RICHARD BOON
Richard Boon was the former first manager of Buzzcocks and boss of the record label, New Hormones.
Boon, born in 1953, is a Leeds Grammar School friend of Buzzcocks’ founder, Howard Devoto, and became the manager for seminal punk group by default, after organising gigs for the band.
Boon participated in the writing of several Buzzcocks songs, using the pen name Alan Dial, and, whilst seeking to release the band’s music, Boon, Devoto and Pete Shelley started the New Hormones label. The label released the influential ‘Spiral Scratch EP’ in January 1977, and began releasing records by other artists regularly from 1979 to 1982.
Richard Boon went on to work for Rough Trade Records, and later became a librarian at Stoke Newington Library, Hackney, London, and is part of the crew at the annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival, held first weekend of June each year.
Mark Guarino
So Blue: The True Story Of The Jayhawks
A TALE FROM THE TWIN CITIES
The Jayhawks burst out of the fabled late eighties Minneapolis music scene (Husker Du, Soul Asylum, the Replacements) and, alongside fellow Midwesterners Uncle Tupelo (and, through them, Wilco and Son Volt), gave birth to the hugely influential “alternative country” movement of the 1990s, and subsequent Americana movement which is still going strong today.
After a pair of early independent releases, the group swiftly became critical favourites and cult heroes with the release of their first major-label album, 1992’s Hollywood Town Hall, and its acclaimed follow-up, Tomorrow the Green Grass.
Their melancholic songwriting, impeccable musicianship and the honeyed harmonies of Mark Olson and Gary Louris quickly gained the band attention, but over time they evolved into a more baroque pop outfit – indebted as much to Brian Wilson as to Gram Parsons. The Jayhawks are considered a natural heir to The Band, The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Kinks, and over the years have been invited to participate in musical projects by many icons from that period, including Roger McGuinn, Ray Davies and Johnny Cash.
So Blue: The True Story of The Jayhawks is the first in-depth book dedicated to the influential band’s 40-year history. Written with their full cooperation, So Bluealso features interviews with the many collaborators, peers, former bandmates, and others who have intersected with, and added to, the band’s long and rich history.
Mark Guarino
Mark Guarino is an award-winning journalist who writes about national news events, trends and culture, with a special emphasis on American roots music.
His previous book, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival (University of Chicago Press), is a deeply researched and ground-breaking first on the subject, covering 100 years of history. It received several awards, including the Belmont University Curb Music Industry Award for Country Music Book of the Year, Book of the Year from the Illinois State Historical Society, and Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, World, or Roots Music Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
For seven years Mark worked as a correspondent for the Washington Post, preceded by another seven years having served as the Midwest bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor. He was the pop music critic for the Chicago Daily Herald for 11 years and his byline has also appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC.co.uk, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, New York, Agence-France Presse, Mojo, among many other outlets. Mark is currently a producer with ABC News.
He is also a frequent music producer, having created successful shows in Chicago and New Orleans, two cities where he splits his time.
Clinton Heylin
A Couple Of Writers From Dulwich: The Parallel Lives Of Raymond Chandler & P. G. Wodehouse
Pulp friction
It would be hard to think of two writers with styles more diametrically opposite than P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. Yet, to this day, they remain the most parodied of writers – sometimes consciously, often unwittingly – a sure sign of writers of the first water.
One was the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster (two characters whose greatest fears were an overbearing aunt, being nabbed stealing a cow creamer, or getting engaged to the wrong girl) and the finest comic writer of his age; the other, a pioneer of the hard-boiled detective story, turned pulp fiction into literature with the seven novels he wrote featuring Philip Marlowe.
Chandler and Wodehouse, these two near-contemporaries and popular literary stylists, never met. Though they knew each other and talked about each other in letters, their paths never crossed in person. Which is not on the face of it entirely surprising. One was born in Guildford, Surrey, to an old English family; the other in Chicago, Illinois, to a family of Irish Quakers.
This is a book about two writers of hugely contrasting styles and yet they have everything in common; both classically educated at the same esteemed educational establishment – Dulwich College – and each of whom shunned the world of literature and turned to pulp fiction. Both liked the colour of money and disdained the literary establishment, preferring to make a name for themselves in popular magazines during the golden era of newsstand fiction, ever carrying on an exchange of ideas with their mutual third wheel, Bill Townend.
The result is a unique dual biography with many unexpected intersections, showing how two very different writers, both supreme stylists, sharing the same educational background, navigated their way through the same milieu, largely along parallel lines: biography by juxtaposition, as it were.
Clinton Heylin
Clinton Heylin is widely acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on Bob Dylan, but he is also a biographer of a whole range of fascinating subjects.
He has forensically examined numerous musical talents (Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, the Velvet Underground and Sandy Denny amongst them), as well as turning his attention to the life of Orson Welles (Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios) and exploring Shakespeare’s sonnets (So Long As Men Can Breathe).
The Irish Independent has considered Clinton “arguably the world’s greatest rock biographer.”
His other acclaimed titles include From the Velvets to the Voidoids (a history of American punk), The Great White Wonders (an in-depth look at bootlegging), It’s One for the Money (a history of song publishing since the birth of the popular music industry) and All the Madmen (a long overdue examination of mental illness in British rock music in the 1960s and 1970s).
Brought up in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School, London, and Sussex Universities, he now lives in Somerset.
Dominic Pedler
God Save The Queen: The Incredible Life Of The Sex Pistols Anthem
A POTENTIAL H-BOMB
God Save The Queen: The Incredible Life Of The Sex Pistols Anthem is the ultimate illustrated history of the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save The Queen’, which is not only the world’s most collectable single but also remains one of the most controversial records ever released.
The book is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the single in May 2027 and covers absolutely everything: the recording, the lyrics and music, the artwork, the A&M release, the move to Virgin, the media reaction, the chart controversy, foreign editions, bootleg editions, collectibles and the song’s enduring afterlife.
Dominic’s definitive text is accompanied by over 450 amazing images (photos, posters, clothing, rare memorabilia, etc), both from the UK and very much worldwide.
Dominic Pedler
Dominic is a freelance writer and musician who has written for Record Collector, Guitarist, Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques and Classic Rock, amongst others. His first book, The Songwriting Secrets of The Beatles, was an acclaimed 800-page appreciation of the Fab Four’s music.
An honours graduate of the Musicians Institute In California, Dominic has also contributed forensic musicology to copyright cases. He has been following the ‘God Save The Queen’ story ever since buying the single as a teenager in 1977 after attending that year’s Silver Jubilee celebrations.
Praise for The Songwriting Secrets of The Beatles:
“Forms more of a basis for serious debate than any other book on the Fab Four and will doubtless be unearthed and referred to by probing future historians in the decades to come” – Mike Read, Record Collector.
“Massively erudite” – Charles Shaar Murray, Mojo.
Jane Plüer
Modernist Poster Stamps
Modern. AS ADVERTISED.
A collection of modernist poster stamps from their golden age in twentieth-century Europe. Curated, from her own collection, by Jane Plüer. A graphic designer and esoterica enthusiast from Germany, now living in England.
Poster stamps originated in nineteenth-century Europe and are now highly valued as an important part of the history of graphic design, popular art and social tradition, and are also highly collectable.
Designed as miniature advertisements they could be found stuck on envelopes, letters and bills. The stamps were created by commercial artists, illustrators and printers, who all added their own effects and interpretations, often including the work of contemporary artists of the time.
Poster stamps were printed in the same way as postage stamps, in multiples on large sheets separated by perforated edges with a glued backing. The visual style, originality and intricacy of their graphics made them popular collectables with both adults and children, with people keeping their collections in specially produced albums.
Poster stamps originated from German-speaking Continental Europe, including Austria, old Czechoslovakia and Germany. This was the heartland of Modernism, the main inspiration for the heyday of poster stamp design in the 1920s and 30s, and then its revival from the 1950s to the 1970s.
JANE Plüer
Jane is an associate partner at Pentagram design company. She has been collecting poster stamps for over a decade and now has hundreds of them.
In 2023 Jane published her story as one of the award-winning Pentagram Papers – highlighting the origins of poster stamps, her avid interest, and growing collection.
She will be exhibiting her collection in New York at The Poster House come March 2028.
Rory Sullivan-Burke
The Luck Of The Irish?
HELP WANTED: THE APPLIED IRISH
The Luck Of The Irish? is the full and extensive story of how the Irish revolutionised Britain after the Blitz. In so many, many ways.
The contributions of the Irish in making Britain the envy of the western world have long been overlooked, underplayed or downright forgotten. The children and grandchildren of the Irish diaspora forever changed the cultural and socio-economic landscapes of Britain.
One. British pop music shaped, and continues to shape, globally. Giving the world what it did not know it wanted. From Lennon and McCartney to Liam and Noel, the Gallagher Brothers of Oasis. From Dusty Spingfield to Elvis Costello. Morrissey and Marr to John Lydon, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Ed Sheeran. And then some.
Two. Running parallel is the fascinating and moving story of the working class Irish who did the jobs that nobody wanted. Who sweat blood and tears in providing the foundations for Britain’s rebirth after WWII. Not only in building the roads, houses, and railway lines, but also, in helping to create the first ever national health service. The pinnacle of ‘a caring state’ that promised to be there for its people from cradle to grave. Something now that everybody wants.
Through commentary and exclusive interviews this book appeals to music heads and those interested in socio-economic and political history. A deep dive into the musical scenes of the UK while exploring the culture, the traditions, the religions, and the difficulties of the Irish diaspora. Not to mention the effect of ‘The Troubles’ on Anglo-Irish relations.
A book to be reckoned with. So it is.
RORY SULLIVAN-BURKE
Rory was born in London’s East End in 1983. He has worked in community care work since he was 16, first supporting children in the inner city and then as a support worker for adults with learning disabilities.
He relocated to West Yorkshire in 2007. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he has used his experience of living with autism to empower and advocate for people on the autistic spectrum.
His earliest memories are of music and it has remained an enduring and pivotal obsession. He is an ardent West Ham United fan. The Light Pours Out Of Me – The Authorised Biography of John McGeoch was his first published work.
To date it has sold over 8000 copies in hardback and is available now as a paperback and an e-book. The Luck Of The Irish? is his follow-up tome.
Kenneth Womack
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Biography
OUR fine four-Fendered friend
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Biography brings the story of the world’s most famous flying car vividly to life. From a germ in Ian Fleming’s 12-year-old mind after witnessing its prototype in action at England’s Brooklands racetrack in 1920 through the making of the hit MGM movie with Dick Van Dyke in the 1960s, the distinctive car has never failed to capture the imagination.
A work of creative nonfiction that traces the heart-warming story of the car’s origins in Fleming’s boyhood imagination through the evolution of its storyline via the various and competing media of a children’s novel, a screenplay, a playful song-cycle, and a film adaptation.
As each new chapter unfolds, readers will be transported across space and time as different auteurs assume temporary custody of Fleming’s creation, including madcap storyteller Roald Dahl, the much-heralded Sherman Brothers of Walt Disney fame, and Ken Hughes, the director who grafted the disparate pieces together into a feature film for the ages.
By turns, each of Fleming’s storytelling successors will become frustrated with, even resentful of his original narrative. But they will have one abiding aspect in common: they simply adore the car.
In addition to the larger-than-life historical personalities of Fleming and Dahl, the book conjures up a variety of unforgettable characters, including racing legend Count Louis Zborowski; cantankerous film producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli; Fleming’s head-strong, steadfast mistress Blanche Blackwell; illustrator John Burningham; renowned English publisher Jonathan Cape; and actors Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews – the latter of whom declined to participate in the film production to Van Dyke’s great despair.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang : The Biography will be additionally well-served by the timely production of a new version of the film. In December 2024, Variety reported that a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang remake is being developed under the direction of Matthew Warchus, with a script by Irish playwright Enda Walsh.
KENNETH WOMACK
Kenneth enjoys a well-developed and internationally revered platform as a public scholar and pop-cultural expert. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on The Beatles and their enduring cultural influence. He is the author of a two-volume biography of famed Beatles producer Sir George Martin: Maximum Volume (2017) and Sound Pictures (2018).
His latest book, Living The Beatles’ Legend: The Untold Story of Mall Evans (2023), traces the extraordinary life and times of the Beatles’ roadie – and has sold more than 35,000 copies globally.
He also serves as the music culture critic for Salon, as well as being a contributor to a host of print and web outlets, including Billboard, Time, Variety, The Guardian, USA Today, The Independent, NBC News, The Times andThe Liverpool Echo.
Kenneth lives in West Long Branch, New Jersey, where he serves as Professor of English and Popular Music at Monmouth University.