Everything Under The Sun – The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd

Author:Mike Cormack

There are already an awful lot of books around on Pink Floyd so the question is I suppose, is there anything new to say or any information that hasn’t already been unearthed and endlessly dissected? Well, the answer is probably not, but a book like this can be useful in collating material from disparate sources and rounding it all up in one handy volume, and of course there’s always room for another opinion on the music itself. The book begins with a detailed look at each album, song by song. The author makes some interesting points although as someone who already knows a lot about the band (sound of own trumpet being blown!), I didn’t learn anything new, and I found the practice of capitalising every song title mentioned in an article quite irritating to be honest. The second section of the book is a detailed chronology day by day of what the band was doing in terms of live shows and record releases, right from its inception. It ends with the release of the Hey Hey Rise Up single in 2022, although oddly the release of The Endless River is missing. Running alongside this is a list of major musical and key world events. This is a section a reader might dip into for reference purposes, but presumably isn’t intended to be read end to end, especially as it’s in quite small print for my ageing eyes! The next section is a chronological list of bootlegs, including track listing and sound quality, although again I think this is something to be referred to rather than read. The earlier years are the more interesting of course, as on the latter day tours, with changes in technology, there seems to be a bootleg for just about every show, all with identical content. It does present the opportunity though to pick out a show of interest and then to try and track it down on the web and have a listen. The book concludes with a short section of interviews, the most interesting being with the ever-affable latter day bassist Guy Pratt and long time engineer James Guthrie. There’s nothing from the three remaining core band members of course. All in all, a decent attempt to produce an all encompassing reference work, and although it doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off that objective it does have a decent try.

Length of Read:Long

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

This should appeal in the main to hard core Floyd devotees, and readers of other books on the band, eg those by Nick Mason, Mark Blake and Nicholas Schaffner.

One thing you’ve learned

The current burst of activity from David Gilmour may well produce a resurgence of interest in the Floyd back catalogue, if one were needed, which can only help stoke up interest in this book.

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