Paradise Road’s Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue has just been published in paperback.  

According to Shindig! magazine, the book “not only delivers a tome worthy of the legendary venue, but also a broader account of popular music in postwar Britain and beyond’. 

We still have some copies of the hardback available. You can order either version through your local bookshop or from Amazon, but all orders through the Paradise Road website will also a receive, free of charge, a 100-page pdf listing of every gig played at the Marquee during the Oxford Street and Wardour Street years (1958–88). 

The coming months will see a new revised paperback edition of Up in Smoke: The Failed Dreams of Battersea Power Station and a paperback version of Raving Upon Thames with a newly added afterword.

To help with the editing of Marquee: The Story of the World's Greatest Music Venue, we decided we would have to compile a complete list of gigs at the club. We did this by visiting the British Library in London where you can find bound volumes of the British music press, including Melody Maker, NME and Sounds. Each week these papers carried distinctive box ads with details of who was playing the club and it’s these ads we strip-mined for our list. It took about six months of weekly Friday visits to gather the information together followed by weeks of typing and formatting. Originally we thought we would include this list at the back of the book, but when we saw how many pages it would fill, we quickly dropped the idea. The list has been sitting on the Paradise Road harddrive ever since. Lately, we thought it was about time we did something with it. We decided to clean it up and make it available to anyone who wants it. If you would like a free copy of this 100-page document, just email info@paradiseroad.co.uk with Marquee gig list as the subject.