The Great Rock Discographer, the man “music lovers everywhere regard as a god”, is looking decidedly mortal when he opens the door of his Falkirk home.
Never mind accolades from the novelist Ian Rankin and the late DJ John Peel (“an extraordinary work of scholarship”); the bespectacled and slightly bloodshot eyes of this particular deity suggest he has been disturbed while resting from creation.
“I’ve tried having a schedule, but it always gets broken,” says Martin C Strong, 46, not long up after a heavy night in the pub. “I often end up getting up to work at 4am, then going back to bed at 8. You have to sleep when you can. That’s the thing about this job — it’s never finished.”
If his tone suggests Sisyphus pushing a stone uphill, there’s no disguising Strong’s pleasure in the glossy new hardback adorning his coffee table. The Essential Rock Discography, published next week by Canongate, is the 15th tome to issue from the impressive filing system that is his brain. Its 350,000-selling predecessors, displayed next to his hundreds of alphabetised CDs, include seven editions of The Great Rock Disco-graphy, plus The Great Metal Discography, The Great Scots Musicography and The Great Alternative and Indie Discography — of which Ian Rankin wrote: “Strong is possibly deranged, certainly obsessed.”
Strong’s accolades often have this ambiguous aspect — “insanely meticulous”; “the last word in rock’n’roll trainspotting”; a “labour of mad devotion” — as if reviewers are awed as much by his nerdish fanaticism as by his scope and accuracy. Strong shrugs it off. “I probably am obsessed, because otherwise I wouldn’t get it done.”
That he has got it done, over and over again, is vindication enough for this once unpromising pupil. The son of an insurance broker and a door-to-door salesman, he left high school in Falkirk with virtually no formal qualifications.
He spent his teens and early twenties traipsing between casual labouring jobs and the benefit office, while filling the time with his other great love: music.
Not a performer himself, he read the NME avidly and enjoyed playing the pundit: listening a few times to each new album, he would jot down track notes, credits and his own short reviews.
In 1982, surveying the piles of papers and cuttings scattered around his flat, a friend suggested he should think about making a book out them. “At first it seemed a crazy idea. I had no real education, I was practically a manual labourer — but then again, I had plenty of imagination. The next day I thought: why not?” Immediately he began to collate his material, expanding his research as far as his limited budget would permit, using public libraries, second-hand record shops and tracks recorded from the radio. Then as now, he never devoted less than 40 hours a week to the project, frequently as many as 80, while struggling to raise a family on unemployment benefit.
It was the book that kept him going through the eventual break-up with his girlfriend — though arguably it was also a contributory factor.
He prefers not to discuss that now, saying only that friends, music and his two daughters got him through, along with a determination to do something that would make his family proud of him.
More than a decade passed before that vindicating moment finally came. In 1994 the Edinburgh publishers Canongate published the first Great Rock Discography. “I’ll never forget passing the local bookshop with my two daughters — Suzanne and Shirley, then 12 and 14 — and seeing it in the window. It was the thrill of my life, like scoring a goal for Scotland in the World Cup.”
Twelve years, seven editions and various spin-offs later, the back-bedroom pipe dream has become an international bestseller, a tribute both to his meticulous research and an apparently insatiable public appetite for musical trivia.
Did you know Meat Loaf got his nickname after treading on the toes of his schoolmaster? Or that Franz Ferdinand’s drummer once played for a band called Yummy Fur? The author blames his photographic memory and an obsessive compulsion to classify things. “Everybody likes making lists,” says Strong, inevitably compared to the nerdy record shop owner of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
When pressed he’ll recite a personal all-time top five (descending) of Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, the Fall, Genesis (“until Peter Gabriel left”) and Todd Rundgren — but his tastes span everything from Run DMC to Debussy.
He gets letters and e-mails from as far afield as Siberia and Australia — usually enthusiastic, occasionally abusive, sometimes querying his ratings, which are an unashamed amalgam of received opinion and personal predilection.
In fact, the opinionated style of his potted biographies — Duran Duran are upbraided for the “fashion crime” of legwarmers, while Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy is “the Roger Moore of rock” — is part of the attraction, elevating it from nerdy factoids to weirdly compulsive entertainment. The latest book distils previous works, adds recent phenomena like the Arctic Monkeys, and makes a few notable cuts, Cliff Richard, for example.
“You can’t include everybody,” says Strong. “Cliff Richard not being in there caused a bit of a stir, but you’ve only got to listen to Mistletoe and Wine . . . he’s obviously just pop.”
Pop is as much a value judgment as a musical description in Strong’s book — a way to categorise all that is unchallenging in the music business. Rock, he claims, is about much more. “It’s about people who take music to new levels, through new barriers,” he says. So Kate Bush and Air make it in, while Take That definitively don’t — though Robbie Williams scrapes under the wire with such solo works as Angels.
Not everyone agrees with Strong’s godlike judgments, but it doesn’t worry him unduly. If he’s mistaken, there’s always the next edition. Rather like a painter of the Forth bridge, the discographer’s work is barely finished before he has to start again. On current royalties and commissions, Strong makes about £30,000 a year — but there are still days when he can’t quite decide if he’s landed a job for life or a life sentence.
Showing me through to the nerve centre of his spare bedroom, he says: “The good bits you love doing — the whole challenge of making a discography — but the bad bits barely even get me out of bed in the morning. Cataloguing, for example.”
While the living room is all stripped pine, yucca and Jack Vettriano prints, the spare room exhibits the creative jumble of a man trying to tame a reference work out of a million pieces of information. Amid piles of papers and overflowing boxes, his current project — a reference work on film soundtracks, due out next year — is stored in a cream filing cabinet.
Notably absent are the expected stacks of old records — surely an important hallmark of musical geekdom, with its nostalgia for the “physicality” of vinyl? “I sold all my records years ago,” says Strong, refreshingly unsentimental.
He’s similarly unmoved by the modern hype over iPods (“next time I hear one of those things on a train I’m going to throw it out of the window”) — though the new Essential Rock Discography does for the first time catalogue downloadable music as a format in its own right. Can he see a day when all music will come by broadband, rendering him a cataloguer of antique album covers? “If that happens, it’ll be great to retire. I’ll let someone else take over.” The baton is unlikely to pass to his two older daughters, or his fiancée, Dawn — though the latter has proved remarkably sympathetic to his quintessentially male obsession.
But there’s hope yet for his two-year-old daughter Samantha. “Actually, we’re starting to worry about her. She’s already putting her crayons in size order,” he says.
For the time being, however, there’s no vacancy. Strong says: “I’ve told myself I’ll fill two shelves with my books and so far 15 of them only fill one . . . so it’ll have to be 30. But then again I might have to get a narrower bookcase.
“I don’t want to be remembered as a boffin or a geek — just a guy who loves life and knows his music.”
The Essential Rock Discography Vol 1, £30, published October 12 by Canongate; www.canongate.net
