Paul Suter

SPOT IT BY the clenched chest and bared fist on the cover. Actually the title is misleading. This is a biography of HM acts (inc. Hard Rock) from Lee Aaron to ZZ Top not a genuine encyclopedia. It lacks, for example, sections on the style and form of the 'plectrum' and the philosophy of the 'riff'.

The author is, apparently, a Kerrang! (that being to Metallers what the Koran! is to Muslims) writer. He delivers his book with a fan's thoroughness and thankfully a lack of hyperbolic excess: straigthforward accounts and discographies of contemporary bands and those with a claim to be at the roots of the current HM blossom (?).

It's not dramatically perceptive ("in a field of monsters Led Zeppelin were true leviathans"; 'Live At Leeds' contains some of (The Who's) heaviest music") but accurate – at least in respect of the one HM artiste of whom I have intimate knowledge.