This blog now on Kindle, iPad, etc

The new cover, designed by Douglas Bentley, who curiously turned the Beatles image on its side. 

The title page

I’ve finally done it.

This blog was originally intended to be a book – but it was always going to be too long and unwieldy for any publisher to be interested. So it became a blog instead.

But now I have started turning it into a book – albeit an e-book. And Part 1 is now available from Amazon.com.

I have substantially revised and updated my original blog postings. There is a lot to read here - an estimated 692 pages. I invite you to read the preview. Just go here.

Thanks must again go to my son, Douglas, an IT student at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth. You may think publishing a book on Kindle is simple, but I watched him do this one and it really does require a substantial understanding of things like HTML and coding generally, which I know nothing about. Lashings of patience are also required.

In a bid to avoid copyright complications, I have restricted my use of images to the album covers, in the belief that these fall under the “fair use” category in so far as the small images are used simply to illustrate the text. For my main pictures I have done my own original drawings of the artists.

Anyway, here’s hoping there are people around the world interested in this book, which coincidently ties in with the documentary feature, Searching for Sugar Man, mentioned in my previous posting, in so far as the liberal white South African’s relationship with rock music was, in a way, far more intense than it perhaps was for young people growing up in the West.

We were a bit like young people behind the Iron Curtain. With a racist, puritanical party ruling and ruining the country, while keeping the lid firmly down on as many “subversive” Western influences as possible, it meant our association with rock music was very much part of our rebellion against the state and the apartheid establishment in general.