Phil Baker

Neil Young, who removed his music from Spotify to protest COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, previously took on the music industry so that fans could hear his music—all music—the way it was meant to be heard.Today, most of the music we hear is com-pressed to a fraction of its original sound, while analog masterpieces are turning to dust in record company vaults. As these record-ings disappear, music fans aren't just losing acollection of notes. We're losing spaciousness, breadth of the sound field, and the ability to hear and feel a ping of a triangle or a pluckof a guitar string, each with its own reso-nance and harmonics that slowly trail off into silence. The result is music that is robbed of its original quality—muddy and flat in sound compared to the rich, warm sound artists hear in the studio. It doesn't have to be this way, but the record and technology companies have incorrectly assumed that most listeners are satisfied with these low-quality tracks. Neil Young is challenging the assault on audio quality—and working to free music lovers from the flat and lifeless status quo. To Feel the Music is the true story of his quest to bring high-quality audio back to music lovers—the most important undertaking of his career. It's an unprecedented look inside the successes and setbacks of creating the Pono player, the fights and negotiations with record companies to preserve master-pieces for the future, and Neil's unrelenting determination to make musical art available to everyone. It's a story that shows how much more there is to music than meets the ear. Neil's efforts to bring quality audio to his fans garnered media attention when his Kickstarter campaign for his Pono player—a revolutionary music player that would combine the highest quality possible with the portability, simplicity and affordability modern listeners crave—became the third-most successful Kickstarter campaign in the website's history. It had raised more than $6M in pledges in 40 days. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, Neil still had a long road ahead, and his Pono music player would not have the commercial success he'd imagined. But he remained committed to his mission, and faced with the rise of streaming services that used even lower quality audio, he was determined to rise to the challenge. An eye-opening read for all fans of Neil Young and all fans of great music, as well as readers interested in going behind the scenes of product creation, To Feel the Music has an inspiring story at its heart: One determined artist with a groundbreaking vision and the absolute refusal to give up, despite setbacks, naysayers, and skeptics.

A revised edition of Phil Baker's critically lauded biography of artist and occultist, Austin Osman Spare. London has harbored many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956). A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man." But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions, and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality. Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologized since his death. This groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare's art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists, and monstrous owls. This richly readable and illuminating biography takes us deep into the strange inner world that this most enigmatic of artists inhabited, shedding new light while allowing just a few shadowy corners to flourish unspoiled. Revised, updated, and with a new afterword by the author, this is the definitive edition of Phil Baker's critically lauded Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist.

A work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London. I dreamed I was paying a visit to London, Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume. Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn. Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and find himself down on his luck in Paddington Green--and never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: the abiding rapture, he wrote in his diary, which makes a 'bus in the street sound like an angel choir

City of cities, the modern world’s first great metropolis, London has shaped everything from clothing to youth culture. It has a unique place in the world’s memory, even as its role has changed from the capital of the planet to its playground, and as its lived history has mutated into the heritage industry.Londoner Phil Baker explores the city’s history, and the London of today, balancing well-known major events with more curious and eccentric details. He reveals a city of almost unmatched historical density and richness. For Baker, London turns out to be Gothic in all senses of the word, enjoyably haunted by its own often bloody past. And despite extensive redevelopment, as he shows in this engaging and insightful book, some of the magic remains.

One of the giants of popular fiction, with total sales of around fifty million books, Dennis Wheatley held twentieth-century Britain spellbound. His Black Magic novels like The Devil Rides Out created an oddly seductive and luxurious vision of Satanism, but in reality he was as interested in politics as occultism. Wheatley was closely involved with the secret intelligence community, and this powerfully researched study shows just how directly this drove his work, from his unlikely warnings about the menace of Satanic Trade Unionism to his role in a British scheme to engineer a revival of Islam. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Phil Baker examines Wheatley s key friendship with a fraudster named Eric Gordon Tombe, and uncovers the full story of his sensational 1922 murder. Baker also explores Wheatley s relationships with occult figures such as Rollo Ahmed, Aleister Crowley, and the Reverend Montague Summers, the shady priest and demonologist who inspired the memorably evil character of Canon Copely-Syle, in To The Devil A Daughter."

Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) is an iconic figure of the Beat generation. In this revealing study Phil Baker traces this cult writer's life - from the New York underworld of the 1940s to Mexico and the South American jungle, Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, Paris and the Beat Hotel, 1960s London, and small-town Kansas - in order to investigate his work as an autobiographical explorer of altered consciousness and inner space, reporting back from the frontiers of his experience.After accidentally shooting his wife in 1951, Burroughs felt it was his destiny to struggle with the 'Ugly Spirit' that had possessed him. His early absorption in psychoanalysis gave way to Scientology and demonology, and he came to believe in an increasingly magical universe, sending curses and operating a 'wishing machine'. His paranoid vision and his lifelong preoccupation with freedom and its opposites - all forms of addiction and control - finally evolved into a concern with ecology and an all-out ethical conflict between good people who live and let live, or 'Johnsons', and those who impose themselves on others, wrecking the planet in the process.Drawing on newly available material, and rooted in Burroughs's vulnerable emotional life and seminal friendships, this insightful book provides a lucid and powerful account of his career and significance.

La Fee Verte (or "The Green Fairy") has intoxicated artists, poets, and writers ever since the late eighteenth century. Stories abound of absinthe's druglike sensations of mood lift and inspiration due to the presence of wormwood, its infamous "special" ingredient, which ultimately leads to delirium, homicidal mania, and death. Opening with the sensational 1905 Absinthe Murders, Phil Baker offers a cultural history of absinthe, from its modest origins as an herbal tonic through its luxuriantly morbid heyday in the late nineteenth century. Chronicling a fascinatingly lurid cast of historical characters who often died young, the absinthe scrapbook includes Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, August Strindberg, Alfred Jarry, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Allais, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso. Along with discussing the rituals and modus operandi of absinthe drinking, Baker reveals the recently discovered pharmacology of how real absinthe actually works on the nervous system, and he tests the various real and fake absinthe products that are available overseas. The Book of Absinthe is a witty, erudite primer to the world's most notorious drink.