Malcolm Campbell is a highly educated person with a precise and trained mind. A family man, he has equally bright offspring and is something of an audiophile with a continuing interest in the 90’s York formed group, Shed Seven.
He also happens to be a Greek scholar at St Andrews University in Scotland and has spent his working life collecting information, cataloguing, researching and interpreting disparate and often disputed facts. As an academic, his career depends on patience, accuracy and the dissemination of truth as he sees it - publication is, and always has been, a must.
Luckily for the rest of us, he is also a passionate Shadows fan.
‘The Vinyl Legacy’ is Malcolm’s second book, his first being the indispensable ‘A Guide To The Shadows And Hank Marvin On CD’ published in 1999. Such is the endeavour of the man that he is already working on a third book concerning the Polydor years.
These books cannot readily be described as ‘a good read’. Don’t imagine yourself at night tucked up in an armchair with a cup of cocoa being transported gently to the land of Nod in a cocoon of quilted prose. Much more likely, your head will be spinning at the sheer volume of information and the continual cross-referencing that will be necessary to assimilate all the facts for which you yearn. You will probably then require a good 10mg of Temazepan before sleep invades.
Malcolm’s contribution to the furtherance of knowledge about The Shads is immense and the workload must have been intimidating. He acknowledges the "... weight of it all" in the preface to this new book and yet he continues with all the enthusiasm of a truly dedicated fan. I can only gasp in awe because while I have squirreled away reams of notes, facts and photocopies over the years I recognise that I could never have compiled such staggeringly good reference books as these.
‘The Vinyl Legacy’ concerns itself with The Shadows’ own EMI career and, significantly, the contribution they made to Cliff’s recordings in the early years - it follows, however, an entirely different format to book one. Regardless of the disparity the two books should (indeed must) be read as an entity and no doubt likewise, the same will apply to the final trilogy.
The new book works its way through the years by means of ‘annual surveys’ but this is too prosaic. The attention to detail and the referencing from every direction is truly absorbing, so each chapter (a survey) is a goldmine of facts worthy of anyone’s money.
Because of its very nature it is an almost impossible task to review the actual content of the book in a concise, meaningful way. Suffice it to say that if you care anything about the Shads’ output you will want to purchase your own copy. Malcolm typesets and publishes these offerings himself and thus takes a mighty financial risk on our behalf. Because of the cost, it isn’t viable to include pictures of record/ CD sleeves etc which would happily serve to break up the text and add an obvious visual stimulus - this is a pity and almost a tragedy. Personally, I long for a multimedia edition of what must be the best researched and most reliable international Shads reference work available to us today.
Without Malcolm’s dedication we would all be the poorer. Shed 7 though?
