REVIEWING MUSIC BOOKS

My review of David Hepworth’s Hope I Get Old Before I Die on Just Backdated earlier this week was the 114th music book review I’ve posted since I launched the blog 10 years ago, and it occurs to me that Just Backdated just might have become the largest dedicated rock’n’roll book reviews website on the internet. I say ‘might’ because for all I know there could be a site along these lines of which I am unaware but when I type ‘rock and roll book reviews’ into Google, all that comes up are individual reviews of individual books, not a site that is dedicated to reviews of lots of music books. If there is such a site, then please tell me about it. 

        When I launched Just Backdated back in 2014 it was never my intention to create a site that featured primarily music books reviews. It just happened that way but I suppose it was inevitable. After all, I spent 33 years as the editor at Omnibus Press, the world’s largest dedicated music book publisher, and in the course of that employment commissioned and edited upwards of 800 rock books, probably more than anyone else in the world, and read many more than that, some to check out as potential Omnibus titles, others purely out of interest. So, I guess I’ve read a few more music books than most people. 

        Nowadays authors and publishers send me loads of music books to review. In many cases the authors are known to me, but some publishers have become aware that they might sell a few more copies if a decent review appears on Just Backdated. Some of the books I’ve reviewed I’ve bought, of course, but I’d say that 75% are sent to me as review copies. BTW, before I buy a book I always always scan the acknowledgments page: if there’s a long list of relevant names then the chances are the book will be OK but if it’s on the short side and the names don’t mean much to me I’ll pass. 

        In my opinion, music book reviews in magazines are invariably too short. In some cases, it’s pretty obvious to me that the reviewer has merely scanned a book, especially when whoever is writing the review uses the opportunity to write more about the act – the subject of the book – than the book itself. In others it seems to me as if all they’ve read is the first chapter and maybe the blurb on the back but I can’t really blame reviewers for this. After all, unlike the hour it might take to listen to an album for review purposes, or the two to three hours or so at a concert, it could take up to a week to read some books in their entirety, and knowing how little magazines pay freelance book reviewers that’s hardly optimum use of time on a sliding pay scale. I don’t get paid for writing book reviews, of course, which goes some way to explaining why most of those I write exceed 1,000 words, far more than you’ll find in any music magazine or even the book reviews pages in most newspapers. Truth is, I do it for fun and generally I’m pretty benign. Only when I decide a book is a load of old rubbish do I say so and, of course, I tend to avoid such books anyway. 

        Inevitably, our house is chock full of books though in 1997, during a house move, I was obliged to sell about 500 music books for space reasons. In those days there was a shop on London’s Denmark Street called Helter Skelter that specialised in music books and its manager, Sean Body, now sadly deceased, and I became quite friendly, so he sold them for me. We split the proceeds 50/50. Now I wish I’d kept a fair few of them as I realise some were quite rare and are going on Amazon for well over their original price.

        I chose to illustrate this piece with one that I will never sell, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock’n’Roll, published in early 1976. I was living in New York at the time, working as Melody Maker’s US editor, and was sent my copy by someone at the magazine. I recall being impressed by the book’s scope, the quality of the writing and pictures, and the attention to detail in the discographies that followed each act or genre it covered. I loved Nik Cohn’s piece on Phil Spector, and Paul Nelson’s investigation into Bob Dylan, written in the hard-edged style of a Raymond Chandler short story. I found only one mistake, a picture of Uriah Heep vocalist David Byron identified as Ian Hunter but when I pointed this out to the magazine someone there told me to fuck off (as if they didn’t believe me!). This book can still be picked up on Amazon for a reasonable price, and is highly recommended for connoisseurs of this kind of thing but be sure to pick up the original edition above and not later, smaller sized, editions in which the photographs are reduced in size.

        The first rock book I ever read was Hunter Davies’ Beatles biography, in 1969, closely followed by The Sound Of The City by Charlie Gillett, Rock From The Beginning (aka Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom) by Nik Cohn and Elvis: A Biography by Jerry Hopkins. In those days rock books were few and far between, unlike today when rock books vie with books about film, sport or the royal family in the non-fiction departments in bookshops. 

        Inevitably I have far more books about The Who than any other act. My first Who book was simply called The Who, by Gary Herman, in 1972, and I have reason to believe that the copy on my shelf is a reprinted pirate edition as the cover is in b&w and not colour: see below, with my copy above the genuine one.

        This was the first ever Who book to have been published (in 1972) but now there are over 70, and 68 of them sit on a shelf in my study; biographies of the group and its individual members, day-by-day chronologies, discographies, collections of press cuttings, fiction by Pete, photo books, sheet music books to which I contributed editorial matter, books that focus on one phase of their career and even one on John Entwistle’s guitar collection. Three of them were written by me, and a fourth co-written. There’s about half a dozen Who books I haven’t bothered with because I sense they won’t be much good but by and large the group has been unusually well served by biographers and chroniclers, which is a testament to their cultural importance, though Pete Townshend’s own literary ambitions may have something to do with it. 

        And like my reviews of books on Just Backdated, I didn’t set out to amass a Who library. It just happened that way.