Michael De Koningh

As the title makes clear, this book is a history of the Trojan record label (and its many offspring) in the UK. It's a lot more than that, though, and some of the extras make it excellent value for the record collector. Over half of the book's 300+ pages are devoted to a description of all of Trojan's many labels and a complete discography of everything issued on them - and indications of which catalogue numbers were never used. There's also a 12-track CD containing some excellent material which rarely shows up on typical compilations.

The first 100 or so pages contain the history itself, and this is where the book is both valuable and flawed. Much of the content derives from interviews conducted by one or the other author, and the structure of the book lurches between following the thread of what a single interviewee discussed and taking a more thematic or chronological approach. This is often extremely frustrating. As the narrative lurches backwards and forwards one ends up reading a lot of interesting anecdotes but struggling to maintain a coherent picture of what's happening.

De Koningh gives credit in the acknowledgements to Mike Atherton for improving his prose. I wish he had worked on it for longer - and I hate to think what the text was like before he improved it. Once you get past this difficulty, though, this is a well-researched, informative and entertaining story of Trojan's part in bringing reggae to the UK. As it now only seems to appear in remainder shops (in the UK at least) it's worth the price for the CD alone.… (altro)