Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, the Myths and the MadnessBy John Harris Sphere; 208pp; £9.99
CAN THERE be any more pleasurable experience than listening to a great album, watching a cracking gig or pondering the lyrical genius of your favourite pop star? Well, yes, actually there is: for sheer, vicarious, trainspotting pleasure, nothing, but nothing, can beat the joy of sitting in a pub discussing rock trivia with a beered-up bunch of like-minded musos.
There’s something compelling about digging up nuggets of half-buried rock’n’roll fact, compiling arcane lists of one-hit wonders, novelty bands and notable stage props, and rifling through rock history in search of weird and wonderful true stories, unsubstantiated rumours and apocryphal tales.
Guardianwriter John Harris has compiled a rock miscellany that contains plenty of trivia, but also a wide range of useful information about the workings of the business we call music. Can't recall the line-up of Live Aid? Here's the day's entire running order. Want to learn bass in one hour and be playing in a band by teatime? Alex James from Blur will kindly show you how.
Within the pages of this little black book, you will find the answers to many of rock's conundrums. If you've pondered the relationship between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moonand The Wizard of Oz, a frame-by-frame breakdown will show you the way. If you've doubted the veracity of tabloid rock stories, a list of the most infamous will prove that bad publicity is good publicity. And if you really want to know what's going on inside Thom Yorke's head, there's a guide to his every lyrical obsession (apparently, worms feature quite heavily).
For dedicated gear-heads, an entire section tracks the evolution of the equipment used by rock stars, from the Moog synthesiser to Jimmy Page’s violin bow. Wanna replicate Jimi Hendrix’s mindblowing onstage set-up circa 1969 or Keith Moon’s unfeasibly large drumkit during The Who’s mid-1970s pomp? It’s all here in neat diagrammatic form, courtesy of the book’s designer and illustrator, Hywel Harris.
A good miscellanist looks beyond the obvious when compiling his lists, and Harris goes off on some neat factual tangents in his search for the useful and edifying. You won't find the list of top rock hotels in your local yellow pages, nor will you find the best-known fictional bands (including the great Dr Teeth the Electric Mayhem from The Muppet Show) in your bog-standard rock encyclopedia.
Other useful lists include the “27 Club” – the notorious afterlife club whose members for eternity include Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Robert Johnson, a complete list of Elvis’s 31 films and an exhaustive guide to every real-life person mentioned in Manic Street Preachers songs.
The Beatles fittingly get a chapter to themselves, wherein Harris bravely tries to unravel the tangled business and legal web of Apple Corps, reassemble the tortuous jigsaw puzzle that is the band's US label output, and sift through every scrap of "Paul is dead" evidence (place a mirror across the drum on the Sgt Pepper coverand you get an eerie message).
There’s also a handy critics’ guide to the Fabs’ solo output, an A-Z of Beatle wives/girlfriends/ mistresses, and a filmography of John and Yoko’s dabblings in arthouse moviemaking (42 minutes of John’s willy, anyone?).
For anyone needing guidance on living a righteous rock’n’roll life, there’s no end of wit and wisdom from the likes of Lemmy, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and the Gallagher brothers, and compilers of pub quizzes should find plenty of potential here.
Bound in a neat, black, hard cover, Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Rollwill make a nice alternative seasonal gift to the usual 2010 diary. It'll certainly be of more use to you.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist
