The best music books for Christmas for the rock and pop fan

10 April 2012

While many will choose to augment their supermarket shop this year with the photographs of Cheryl Cole in Through my Eyes (Bantam, £18.99) or Chris Heath's annotated picture book of Robbie Williams, You Know Me (Ebury, £20), elsewhere there are some books dedicated to fitting together the million-piece jigsaw that is music as a whole.

None are more learned and readable than Listen to This by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate, £25), the New Yorker's music critic and author of an unlikely bestseller about modern classical music, The Rest is Noise. In this collection of previously published New Yorker essays and new material he ranges even more widely, making century-spanning, triple-jumping connections in the same way his shuffling iPod leaps from Stravinsky to Louis Armstrong. Coming from a background of listening to nothing but classical music in his teens and discovering rock'n'roll in adulthood, Ross can explain the brute appeal of, say, Radiohead's Creep in a way that makes you feel your mind enlarging as you read.

Rob Young takes a similarly irreverent view of a more specific area, British folk, in Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (Faber, £17.99). Starting with the effects of traditional music on the classical compositions of Holst and Vaughan Williams, he goes as far as welcoming industrial band Coil and techno producer Aphex Twin under his huge umbrella. His gathering together of many of music's greatest eccentrics makes for some tremendous yarns.

A more visual, dippable way of linking together rock's disparate strands comes in Bruno MacDonald's Rock Connections (Omnibus, £19.95). In a similar vein to Pete Frame's classic rock family trees or just a Wikipedia page, it deals with notable rock and pop acts over two or four pages, with coloured "links" to connected bands, clubs and labels elsewhere in the book. It's lively as a piece of design but thin as a reference work, and all those footnotes don't make it an easy read.

Better for just looking at the pictures is The Art of British Rock by Mike Evans with Paul Palmer-Edwards (Frances Lincoln, £25). With more than 350 flyers and album covers arranged chronologically from the Fifties on, everybody will find an image that triggers a host of memories. People You'd Like to Know, a compendium of pictures by New York photographer Herb Wise (Omnibus, £24.95), shifts the focus away from logos towards faces. His visits to Seventies blues, folk and rock festivals make for an array of evocative black-and-white images of musicians absorbed in their craft, from Bob Dylan to New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair.

But the real staple of the music book is the biography. The big question is: do you go auto- or unauthorised? Mark Blake's Is this the Real Life? The Untold Story of Queen (Aurum, £20) is an impressively detailed overview, with a long index that includes everything from "May, Brian, astrophysicist" to "Mercury, Freddie, male lovers". Blake covers the dirt and the parties but not at the expense of thoughtfulness about the music and the dynamics of a band of very different personalities.

When the musicians themselves are put in front of the keyboard, however, the myth takes centre stage — it's less factually reliable but far more fun. Keith Richards plays beautifully to type in Life (Weidenfeld, £20), bitching about Jagger and Jones, while detailing drug consumption that would floor a rhino and being surprisingly lucid on the subject of the songs, too.

Less of a legend but still boasting a nice turn of phrase, Carl Barât helps his own myth along in Threepenny Memoir: The Lives of a Libertine (Fourth Estate, £14.99). He turns out to have almost as addictive a personality as his notorious former bandmate, Pete Doherty, looking wasted on a lavatory on the cover, telling of a drug-induced Glastonbury fist fight with the bassist from Pulp and an appearance live on Sky TV "as I attempted to chew my own face off". He lays it on a bit thick with the squatting weirdos of Camden, but stays true to the most entertaining rule of the rock memoir and beyond: always print the legend.

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