the prog bookshelf. This hefty tome has been put together with loving care by Mark Powell, the man behind the estimable Esoteric Recordings label. Basically Mark
has selected 100 or so classic prog albums and fills in their background with the aid of photos, press cuttings and comments from the musicians involved. It’s a hefty tome, with a Phil Smee cover design to boot, and while I spotted a few errors (for example the B-Side of The Pretty Things’ ‘Defecting Grey’ is ‘Mr Evasion’, not ‘Walking Through My Dreams’), it generally does its job admirably. Inevitably though, being the curmudgeon
that I am, I do have a couple of reservations. Firstly, the prose style is dull, repetitive and flatter than Grace Jones’ haircut. On one hand, the “Just the facts, ma’am” approach is useful when untangling the countless line- up changes and tangled chronologies, but completely missing is the sense of joyful (and ridiculous) showmanship that was a vital component of prog at its best. Yes, there were furrowed brows and diminished sevenths a-plenty, but there were also capes, daggers and exploding armadillos! Then there’s the question of what’s
actually included. I realise that this is one man’s list, and each to his own, but here there seems to be a bias towards albums from the Esoteric catalogue, which is completely understandable of course, but still makes for some baffling omissions. Do Nektar really deserve to have three albums included when there’s no mention at all of Procol Harum, an undisputed top tier band? And where are Moving Waves, Rock Bottom, Paris 1919, the first ELO album, anything by Henry Cow? Without at least some of them, things are a trifle skew-whiffed. Perhaps an updated, expanded second edition might be an idea, and don’t get me wrong, what’s here for now is certainly a laudable effort. Mick Capewell
Q65 Pim Scheelings UT Publishing
www.ugly-things.com
This is the English- language version of the first ever book about Q65 – the true bad boys of the Dutch ’60s rock scene. And it will come as no surprise to many that it’s been published by
UT, the book and record imprint of Mike Stax’s incomparable Ugly Things, itself the
first fanzine to evangelise about the powerful music, wild image and astonishing legacy of Q65 to the new breed of garage-psych and R&B heads of the mid-80s. The great strength about this book is that Scheelings has left almost all the talking to those who were there at the time, including the various members of Q65 from their initial, crucial mid to late ’60s heyday and those who, for better or worse, traversed with them throughout the group’s long, stop-start journey towards more recent years. You can read extracts from the book elsewhere in this very issue! It’s clear from the outset that there’s
never been much love lost between certain band members and this, undoubtedly, played a part in bringing to the fore the angst, barely-contained violence, overwhelming- sounding joy and impenetrable otherness found in the likes of ‘The Life I Live’, ‘Cry In The Night’, ‘I Despise You’, ‘From Above’, ‘It Came To Me’ and many other Q65 gems. In context, they looked and sounded truly menacing – think The Pretty Things and then some – and on more than one, or two, or three…occasions, this would get them into trouble. Even to those, like me, who profess some
knowledge about the group and their music, prepare to let, especially, Joop Roelofs and Frank Nuyens (guitars) and Peter Vink (bass) tell you, in their relaxed, personal way, all about the guys in the group, entourage, the recording engineers, managers, fans, the hyped-up, made-up rivalry between other groups from the band’s hometown The Hague, and about some of their adversaries too. What made them, and what broke them, it’s all here. Some amazing pictures help document the various phases Q65 went through too. It ain’t a pretty story but be sure to grab
up a copy of this riveting book! Lenny Helsing
ROLLING STONES WORLDWIDE III: AN ANTHOLOGY OF ORIGINAL LP RELEASES 1963-1971 Christoph Maus Maus Of Music
maus@maus-of-music.com
Amidst today‘s faceless super-gadget overkill, it’s refreshing to come across a world where downloads and CDs don’t exist – the collecting and
treasuring of vinyl records. Despite logically being a dying pursuit, this fixation shows no sign of abating as prices continue to
skyrocket for prime items, especially by The Beatles and Stones. Speaking as a collector of the latter for
the last 48 years, I long ago realised that completism could never be an option as the area of foreign releases was such a convoluted minefield – excruciating to list, difficult to track down and prohibitively expensive to acquire. This makes Hamburg- based Christoph Maus’ labour of love all the more remarkable as he meticulously chronicles every album the Stones released between 1963 and ’71 in every country they were released in, even down to dodgy Allen Klein ’70s botch jobs. And, thanks to a super-collector called Tom Sattler, most entries are illustrated. Apart from being a source of either great fascination or frustration to hardened Stones trainspotters, the book will also enthrall the casual fan as their early history unfolds visually, ranging from period gems like the green-tinted classic ’66 photo adorning a ’70 Venezuelan Best Of to genuinely odd creations such as the ’67 Dutch reissue of the first album which plants their heads in what looks like a field of lettuce. Elsewhere they are displayed, with values, artifacts of often stunning visual impact, or sometimes hilariously off beam DIY, covering far-flung markets such as Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Zimbabwe. There are also some marvellous stories, such as old school Russian censorship resulting in Stones tracks being secreted on pressings of James Last albums, which went on for years. It’s obsessive projects like this which are
the lifeblood of record collecting – often far more preferable than the portentous expounding, sensational fact-bending and dogged regurgitation which goes on in the endless biographies of these immortal names. Mr Maus is now probably traversing the Stones’ albums from ’72 to the present; hopefully safe in the knowledge that he’s outdone Bill Wyman as the group’s premiere archivist. Kris Needs
WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN: THE WHO FROM LIFEHOUSE TO QUADROPHENIA Richie Unterberger Jawbone Press
www.jawbonepress.com “There were two groups,” remembers longtime Who chronicler and friend of Pete Townshend, Richard Barnes, in reassuringly everyman tones. “People who understood Lifehouse and people who didn’t. The people who understood included one, Pete Townshend. The people who didn’t was
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everybody else he ever tried to explain it to. The rest of the human race.” The troubled
gestation of The Who’s stillborn, high-concept follow-up to their
Frankenstein’s monster, Tommy, has been well documented over the years. But Lifehouse refuses to die, periodically reappearing as a BBC radio show, a series of solo Townshend concerts, a 6-CD box set and all manner of thwarted movie and multimedia events – each in a slightly altered form to the last – and will undoubtedly remain The Who’s great unsolved mystery. Richie Unterberger’s book takes us on a
complex journey that begins in the wake of Tommy’s globe-gobbling success at the dawn of the ’70s and ends in the exhausted aftermath of 1973’s Quadrophenia. The road is littered with scrapped movies, smash hit albums, forgettable singles, career-defining live shows, on-tour debauchery and technological invention; not to mention nervous breakdowns, metaphysical dilemmas, spiritual conversions and enough smashed guitars, drum kits and hotel rooms to fill a complementary volume of seedy rock anecdotes 10 times over. Impeccably and painstakingly researched
from scores of reviews and interviews new and old, but centred around a hefty amount of Unterberger’s own theorising, no stone is left unturned in getting to the beating heart of Townshend’s often baffling and contrary motivations during what most Who fans would consider the band’s most monumental and fascinating three years. Unreservedly recommended to fans and
novices alike. Now go and listen to ‘Baba O’Riley’. Really loud. Andy Morten
Nervous breakdowns, metaphysical dilemmas... Pete Townshend lets off enough steam to power the entire Welsh rail network
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