London Live: From the Yardbirds to the Sex Pistols
by Tony Bacon (Miller Freeman 192 pp.)
by Thomas Christian
Like the title sez, a detailed dossier of music makers punctuated with reprinted reviews and geographical maps detailing who played where ’round London Town in the post-Queen Victoria Era. Part pop history, part travel guide, London Live concentrates for the most part on the 25-year period between the 1950s and ’70s.
Pop culturists, visiting tourists, and curious observationists graced with a compulsive-ness for statistical detail would eat these retromes in their entirety. For the rest of us simple r’n’r glory folk there are photo journal glossies of skifflers, a heavily mascara’d Siouxsie Sioux, and a snapshot of a long-haired teen-aged Johnny Thunders, already sporting the out-of-it look that later made him famous.
Overall however, the kicks are minimized in deference to chronological study. 40 pages (that’s a full 25% of the book) devoted to listings of the nightly bookings of the Marquee Club is just too much of a good thing whereas one (and only ONE !) mention in the entire volume of Keith Richards either in name or likeness is unconscionable. One would think a work devoted to the UK music scene of the sixties and seventies would warrant a little more attention and a broader view.