This streamlined 2006 edition of what was once The Great Rock Discography no longer includes artists such as Gong, Talk Talk, Kirsty MacColl or even Abba, so it's much less comprehensive than you might have hoped, despite stretching across 1,250 pages. Yet space was somehow found for The Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabian, Keane, The Killers, The Kooks, Korn, Lenny Kravitz, and so on.
It's in desperate need of proof-reader:
• The commas and apostrophes are all over the place – for example: "you're answers please on the back of a postage stamp" (p.472), This Years Model (p.243), etc
• There are silly typos such as "the The Smiths" (p.996) and spelling errors such as "punk sterotypes" (p.388) and "Blur mainman Damon Alborn" (p.605)
• There are factual errors: Morrissey's book was called James Dean is Not Dead, not James Dean Isn't Dead (p.996). The Fall's Levitate album was released in September 1997, not February 1998 (p.393). And in the same entry, keyboard player Marcia Schofield has been renamed "Marsha Schofield" (p.390).
If these mistakes can be found on a first glance through the pages, then what else is incorrect? The usefulness of a reference work of this kind depends on you being able to trust the information it offers.
By the end of the book, the printing has gone askew. The last few pages have been sliced in such a way that text is right up against the edge of the page and very difficult to read. On p.1,153, the caption "Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground" is also sliced off midway through the text. It may just be my copy, of course, but I'd still suggest you check before buying.
The artist biographies are deliberately subjective and opinionated, which can be entertaining, but the excessive exclamation marks make some of the entries tiresome. And some are a little simplistic: there's way more to Nico than "an avante-garde, moody songstress" (p.757).
These might sound like fussy points, but after all the effort that went into compiling this it's a real shame that a potentially invaluable reference book is undermined by things that might easily have been fixed. Maybe the next edition?
