Ray Connolly

a restless life

Being John Lennon

A “sympathetic and exceptionally well-written account” (USA Today), Ray Connolly’s biography of the King soars with “spontaneity and electricity” (Preston Lauterbach). Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and traditionally black rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which simply blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America. In Being Elvis veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world’s most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way. Juxtaposing the music, the songs, and the incendiary live concerts with a personal life that would later careen wildly out of control, Connolly demonstrates that Elvis’s amphetamine use began as early as his touring days of hysteria in the late 1950s, and that the financial needs that drove him in the beginning would return to plague him at the very end. With a narrative informed by interviews over many years with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, B. B. King, Sam Phillips, and Roy Orbison, among many others, Connolly creates one of the most nuanced and mature portraits of this cultural phenomenon to date. What distinguishes Being Elvis beyond the narrative itself is Connolly’s more subtle examinations of white poverty, class aspirations, and the prison that is extreme fame. As we reach the end of this poignant account, Elvis’s death at forty-two takes on the hue of a profoundly American tragedy. The creator of an American sound that resonates today, Elvis remains frozen in time, an enduring American icon who could “seamlessly soar into a falsetto of pleading and yearning” and capture an inner emotion, perhaps of eternal yearning, to which all of us can still relate. Intimate and unsparing, Being Elvis explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, ultimately offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.

Being Elvis: A Lonely Life

On the fortieth anniversary of Elvis Presley s death comes this rocking biography of an iconic artist who fundamentally transformed American culture."

A Lonely Life

Being Elvis

Sunday Morning

Part mystery, part ironic black comedy, part love story, this novel tells of the making of a hundred-million-dollar film which starts out as a tiny Fringe play at the Edinburgh Festival and ends in adultery, murder and the collapse of a Hollywood studio. By the author of Sunday Morning.

Shadows on a Wall

First published in 1980, this is a tale of Charlie Fairweather, song-writer and occasional performer, for whom holidays meant quick affairs, quickly forgotten. But the woman he met in Sicily was different. Kate Sullivan was beautiful, sophisticated and deliciously sensuous. Why was she so alone? Why was she so afraid of his friendship? Why did she disappear? Obsessed by his search for Kate, Charlie finds himself drawn into an unknown and dangerous world where anything can be bought and death is the easiest answer.

A Sunday Kind of Woman

Aking a fresh look at the twentieth-century icon who fundamentally transformed American culture, a veteran rock journalist explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.

The Beatles wrote 176 of the greatest songs ever to appear in popular music. This songbook includes every single one of them. Each piece is arranged for Piano and Voice, with full lyrics and chord symbols. These simplified arrangements are accompanied by original photographs and some of the strangest, full-colour illustrations to ever grace a book. The wonderfully surreal presentation, along with an absorbing article by Ray Connolly, makes this a commemorative collectible as much as a book of music.

The Beatles: Complete (Easy Piano Edition)

Jim McClaine is a product of the fifties.When boys were spotty and girls were out of reach-and nobody could play rock music like the Americans. Jim opts out of the academic rat-race and lives out his fantasies working for a holiday camp and a fair. But the humdrum realities of life don't seem to have much to do with James Dean, Marlon Brando or Chuck Berry....

That'll Be The Day

A Tribute to the Most Legendary Figure of Them All. 69 Songs Everybody Associates with Elvis Presley's Career, Together with Piano/vocal and Chord Symbols. Ray Connolly's Fascinating Account of Presley's Life...

Elvis, Complete

In His Own Write & a Spaniard in the Works

John Lennon, 1940-1980

Perched between bleak moors and a cold, grey winter sea, the North Devon Riviera Hotel is an unlikely destination for February. But, for the handful of guests gathered under its roof it's just about perfect. Amy Miller has fallen in love with a married man. A famous married man. And they've been caught. With the tabloid press in pursuit, Amy's gone into hiding, holing up where she's sure no-one will ever find her. Waiting for her lover to call, Amy begins to question their affair, wondering if it's really what she wanted, wondering even if there is a point to love... But as the hotel prepares for its Valentine's ball and the tabloids circle ever closer, Amy and the North Devon Riviera's other guests are going to discover that love - whether it's young love, old love, shared love or unrequited love, a night's love or a lifetime's love - does indeed make the world go round.

Love Out Of Season

The Beatles wrote 176 of the greatest songs ever to appear in popular music. This songbook includes every single one of them. Each piece is arranged for easy Guitar, with melody lines, chord diagrams and full lyrics. These simplified arrangements are accompanied by original photographs and some of the strangest, full-colour illustrations to ever grace a book. The wonderfully surreal presentation, along with an absorbing article by Ray Connolly, makes this a commemorative collectible as much as a book of music.

The Beatles: Complete (Easy Guitar Edition)

John Lennon was a rock star, a school clown, a writer, a wit, an iconoclast, a sometime peace activist and finally an eccentric millionaire. He was also a Beatle - his plain-speaking and impudent rejection of authority catching, and eloquently articulating, the group's moment in history. Chronicling a famously troubled life, Being John Lennon analyses the contradictions in the singer-songwriter's creative and destructive personality. Drawing on many interviews and conversations with Lennon, his first wife Cynthia and second Yoko Ono, as well as his girlfriend May Pang and song-writing partner Paul McCartney, Ray Connolly unsparingly reassesses the chameleon nature of the perpetually dissatisfied star who just couldn't stop reinventing himself.

The extraordinary decade of the 1960's was always slightly out of sync. It began late - with a remarkable flourish in 1963 with The Beatles, That Was the Week That Was, the Profumo affair and the Great Train Robbery all competing in an atmosphere of giggling frivolity for newspaper headlines - and ended in the early seventies in disillusionment, growing unemployment and accelerating inflation. During that period Ray Connolly was at the centre of the whirlpool of popular arts and rock music, and his weekly journalistic profile of the famous and infamous became an acknowledged notice-board for the style-makers of the sixties. This book collects fifty of his most celebrated character studies and for the most part the subjects are men and women from the author's own age-group - Mick Jagger, Jean Shrimpton, Peter Fonda, David Bailey and Germaine Greer - young people who saw the opportunity to make waves during that era of extravagance, and whose images we saw reflected everywhere. In compiling this book, Ray Connolly has been able to recall the superstars of that time and also to discover what has happened to them since those days of heady optimism.

Talking About My Generation

Stardust Memories

The year is 1963 and Jim Maclaine, star of That'll Be the Day has grown his hair, grown up and become a singer with a rock and roll band called the Stray Cats. Performing to bored audiences in seedy clubs, they live on dreams of becoming as famous as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. A combination of luck, ruthlessness and a lot of hard hustling on the part of Mike Mennery, Jim's old fair-ground friend, makes the Stray Cats rock and roll superstars.But just when they have achieved their dream, it starts to go sour...

Ray Connolly

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