NUMBER ONE IN HEAVEN: The Heroes Who Died for Rock N Roll

by Jeremy Simmonds
Published by Penguin

I've been away for a couple of weeks, and returned to find a big mountain of new CDs waiting for me to listen to and review. Since I've yet had time to give them more than a cursory ear, today's post is a book review I did a couple of years ago for a massive title called Number One in Heaven. Jeremy Simmonds' enormous volume is an indispensible resource for anyone with an interest in rock and popular music as one of the main cultural phenomonons of the last half-century. In its 500-plus pages, Simmonds collects hundreds of rock obituaries, presenting them in an easy-to-find month-by-month format for every year between 1965 and the end of 2005 and in doing so creates an engrossingly readable, occasionally humourous and often sad book.

This weighty tome unveils a lot of the mystery and myths surrounding the passing of some of the world's greatest stars and gives column space to many, many lesser known ones. It also reveals which group boasts the most dead members (doo-wop vocal group The Inkspots, as it turns out, although Lynyrd Skynyrd and T-Rex must come close by now), which group lost the most members in one go (Reba McEntire's backing band, who lost seven at once in a plane crash in 1991), and plenty of strange co-incidences, bizarre suicides, accidental deaths and murders. He also includes small snapshots of people who came remarkably close to death but somehow survived, like Nikki Sixx' monumentally stupid double overdose and Rick Allen's limb-severing car smash. The end of each year's section also features a small round-up of other lesser-known figures. This allows Simmonds to include even lesser lights who would otherwise be completely forgotten, but it also reveals a strange and confusing omission that will be elaborated upon shortly.

Often books like this will gloss over or even completely ignore many of the those who have fallen in the metal world, but Simmonds (for the most part) doesn't forget them either. From this perspective, most of the bigger names are included: Dimebag, Cliff and Randy, of course, the Mayhem pair of Dead and Euronymous, plus Steamin' Steve Clark from Def Leppard, Cozy Powell, Randy Castillo, Razzle from Hanoi Rocks, Gary Driscoll from Rainbow, and Piggy from Voivod. Paul Samson, Paul Baloff, Rhett Forester from Riot, Megadeth's Gar Samuelson, Somnium from Finntroll, David Wayne from Metal Church and all three of Body Count's growing body count also get space. Savatage's Criss Oliva and Dave Pritchard from Armored Saint even get mentions.

Simmonds loses significant Brownie points, however, for the incomprehensible omission of Chuck Schuldiner. That such a highly influential character from the development of metal could be totally ignored in such an otherwise excellently researched and all-encompassing book seems not only inexcusable, but inexplicable, especially when he's thought to include Steve MacDonald from Gorguts, two members of Hallow's Eve, a bloke from a band called Doom that even I've never heard of and some guy who was in Blue Öyster Cult for about ten minutes in about 1971 and never recorded anything. Even if Simmonds knew very little about Chuck, a music journalist of his reputation should have at the very least known both who he was and that he'd died, and when. This is Number One in Heaven's unforgivable flaw, and the thing that stop this otherwise brilliant book from scoring the highest mark possible.

NB: There's an associated website address given in the introduction that the author has included for readers to suggest corrections, but when I tried it so I could prod him about Schuldiner, it didn't work.

Rating: 90%