You may recall back in early August a new book titled Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd from author Mike Cormack was due to be published at the end of the month, promising to be the best deep dive into the music of Pink Floyd, as well as the most extensive and up to date guide to bootleg recordings, plus more! The publisher and author have graciously provided our own team member Natalie Lyons with a copy for review, which you can read below. Enjoy!

ALL THAT YOU READ
A Review of Mike Cormack’s Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floyd
by Natalie Lyons

Pink Floyd, perhaps more than most commercially successful rock bands, lend themselves particularly well to the medium of books. If you were looking to buy a gift for, say, your stoner uncle or an aloof teen with a record player, you might consider a Floyd-related book. But lo, a scan through Amazon reveals a veritable smorgasbord of Floydian literature! From straightforward biography to coffee table photo books, from colouring books to philosophical analysis, and a whole array of incredibly specific volumes focusing on one album, performance, or instrument.

So where does Everything Under the Sun fit in this delightful library? Well, for starters, it has zero pictures, so you’ll have to go to Tumblr for photos of The Lads performing shirtless in San Tropez in 1970. Nevertheless, it’s a mighty tome, roughly the weight of a house brick. The subtitle boldly claims it to be “The Complete Guide To Pink Floyd”, and it certainly contains an impressive amount of information. There’s a detailed analysis of every Pink Floyd song, a timeline of their every live performance, and the pièce de résistance: a complete (at time of writing) guide to every known Pink Floyd bootleg recording. There’s also a nice intro on Cormack’s background as a Pink Floyd fan, and three interviews with notable Pink Floyd ancillary figures as an appendix.

Cormack’s decision to open the book with his personal story of how he became a disciple of the Floyd might have come across as self-indulgent, but actually sets the approachable and exuberant tone. It also makes the author instantly relatable, especially as a second-generation fan, and one from a British working class background. There’s a sense of raw enthusiasm that can often be missing from drier, more journalistic analysis of the band.

The structure of the book is interesting. The shelves of the Pink Floyd bibliophile are warped under the weight of numerous biographies, so to explore the band’s story only through the context of the songs they produce is a more original approach, though not entirely unique. One might raise an eyebrow at the decision to include presumed musician credits on every track, given that David Gilmour sued Gay Dad singer Cliff Jones in the ‘90s for attempting such a feat, but it feels like Cormack is doing a better job. He’s also included the caveat that in some cases this information is lost in the corridors of time, hopefully avoiding any pesky litigation.

We’ve probably all read enough about Nick’s racing cars, Syd’s Mandrax, Rick’s padlocked cornflakes and Roger’s revolving door policy on wives, so it feels refreshing to dispense with this and just focus on the music. Biographical information is included, but only where it gives context and meaning to the creation of the songs. For example, Syd’s drug use is explored from the perspective of how the experience of hallucinogenic drugs actually relates to the writing and consumption of psychedelic music. Some stuffier texts might ignore the fact that Piper sounds damn good when tripping in favour of the “tragic acid casualty” narrative.

As well as a certain amount of revisionism, Cormack’s status a second generation fan also gives him the superpower of ultimate hindsight. Everything Under The Sun examines Pink Floyd’s music not only in terms of their own back catalogue, but also relative to popular music in its entirety. This is interesting as Pink Floyd often get compartmentalised, as though they were off noodling away on their islands and behind their walls, blissfully unaware of Kraftwerk or Throbbing Gristle or The Bay City Rollers. For fans whose musical tastes expand beyond the confines of Floyd, Led Zep and Genesis, it’s utterly joyful to see, for example, Animals being compared to The Stranglers.

There’s also a lot of exploration of Pink Floyd’s music in relation to jazz. This is particularly useful when evaluating Rick’s contribution to the band as its resident jazzo, and how integral this influence was to their sound. The book also brings up some interesting parallels with Miles Davis’ style of band leadership and Roger Waters’ – namely being an utter bastard but also a genius.

Along the way there’s a phenomenal quantity of footnotes, enough to impress even the most ardent Terry Pratchett fan. The breadth and scope of these footnotes is astonishing, as they encompass a myriad of literary references, statistical information, anecdotes, pithy quotes and pub quiz style factoids on all manner of subjects, from the KLF to Arsenal FC to WH Auden to The Shining. Largely unnecessary, but a lot of fun*.

The middle section of the book, the timeline of gigs, is fascinating largely because it shows how intensely the band worked, particularly in the early days of their career. It includes columns of world events and music news as well, so you can see exactly what our boys were up to when, say, Elvis met Nixon or Bernard Butler left Suede.

Next up is possibly the most intriguing section of the book, for Pink Floyd uber-nerds: A list of all known bootleg recordings, along with sound quality ratings, set lists and notes about the gigs. It feels like a genuine labour of love for the author, and is also a testament to the tenacity of fans with audio recording equipment – of the 1200 gigs that Pink Floyd played, over 500 were bootlegged! The notes here are, like the rest of the book, often amusing and irreverent, with comments like, “Goes on for nearly 19 minutes, and feels like it.” Atom Heart Mother seems to be the source of much of the author’s frustration, and he really has taken one for the team by sitting down and listening to every live recording of it. In the age of obsessively scouring Discogs for matrix numbers, this exercise in anal retentiveness will no doubt be saluted.

The book concludes with interviews with Guy Pratt, James Guthrie and Steve Mac (of The Australian Pink Floyd), which are all insightful, for different reasons. Guy Pratt’s tales of being the young upstart picked to play bass on the gargantuan Momentary Lapse tour are familiar, but always amusing. James Guthrie’s detailed explanations of some of the technical aspects of recording Pink Floyd are mind-boggling, and it’s nice to hear someone speak of all of the band members so warmly. Steve Mac’s passion for the band has been rewarded with the ultimate fanboy prize – playing for David Gilmour at his 50th birthday party – which is the perfect uplifting coda to the story of a band who have a reputation for being miserable bastards.

Everything Under the Sun is a book that manages to be both fun and reverential, accessible yet meticulously researched. It’s unusually jovial for a Pink Floyd book (with the exception of Nick’s witty autobiography). Cormack not only succinctly sums up the appeal of Pink Floyd’s music, but also reminds us what made them colourful and dark, edgy and hilarious, terrible and brilliant all at once.

*Though I disagree with his outrageous remarks on Do They Know It’s Christmas.

You can order your copy here: UK | USA

Review thanks to AFG team member Natalie Lyons