| Pink Floyd Book:
Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd
Book
Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd |  |  | | List Price: $39.95 | | Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Salesrank: 934075
| | Our Price: $27.54 | | | | Media: Paperback | |
Editorial Review:
From their gigs in tiny church halls to multimillion-selling albums—The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and the rock opera The Wall—and elaborate stadium shows, this tome celebrates legendary rock band Pink Floyd. Lavishly illustrated with previously unpublished photographs and rare graphic memorabilia, including posters, advertisements, handbills, and tickets from every era of the band’s remarkable history, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the group, its members, and the times. In addition to a biographical account of the band’s collective and individual careers—from their pre-Floyd times in the early 1960s to the present day and their music’s evolution from psychedelic and space rock to progressive rock genres—this definitive reference presents a meticulously researched chronological listing of every Pink Floyd and solo concert with set lists, radio and television appearances, and a UK and U.S. discography. Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd Reviews:
Echoes - Pink Floyd book review 
2009-08-30 - Great great book
If you want to know if anything of Floyds is available on film then this is your book
Beautiful beautiful book. Really nice pictures and book design (lovely pages)
I'm not sure if this book is published in the US yet but its well worth a read. Absolutely lovely
Wish as much care had been taken with the text as the research 
2009-05-07 - Author Glenn Povey discusses the extensive research he did for this book at great length, and it shows in the many otherwise unpublished photos, the nearly comprehensive set lists, and other interesting archival material he managed to dig up. The layout does justice to the material; the book is at nearly every point visually striking. This is a worthwhile purchase (especially at the theft-like price I was able to find it for at Half-Price Books).
However, while I will give Povey the benefit of the doubt that he really did put as much effort into his research as he says, not nearly as much care seems to have been taken to make the text reflect that. In the opening chapter I found one stretch with three errors, or at least things in need of further explanation, in as many pages. In the first full paragraph on page 19 there is a bizarre transition where it suddenly and confusingly jumps from talking about Syd Barrett's personality to David Gilmour's without any warning, as though a couple of sentences had been dropped; on page 20 the text says Barrett would play bass with his other band, Those Without, when in Cambridge, but the picture clearly shows him playing a guitar, with someone else playing bass (we don't see the bass player, only the tuning pegs of his instrument sticking into the picture); on page 21, in the picture of the Ramblers (a band David Gilmour was briefly a part of), I would think their manager would, contrary to the caption, be the older man with the cane third from the left, not the teenaged-looking guitarist on the far right.
A book that much research went into should by all rights be the definitive source on the band, but this just isn't. Not only are there a number of obvious errors or at least "WTF?" moments like the above (perhaps the biggest - Povey claims as fact that Alan Parker has enough footage to make a good Wall concert film, every other source with which I'm familiar says all efforts to shoot one were hopelessly botched), but there just isn't *enough* text for this to be such a book. I estimate that Povey's narrative covers only about a third of the book's 368 pages, and many of that third are dominated by large photographs and blown-up quotes.
The rest of the book is dominated by minutiae like comprehensive lists of concert dates (most with setlists) and an extremely detailed discography. Don't get me wrong, much of this material is interesting in its own right, at least for a slightly OCD Floyd nerd like myself, but scintillating and insightful reading it isn't.
I guess what's there isn't bad, but what isn't there definitely disappoints.
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