CHRISTMAS EVE PANIC buying should lead to John Peel’s Margrave Of The Marshes (Bantam £18.99; offer £16.99) becoming this year’s rock’n’roll Eats, Shoots and Leaves: it ticks at least one box for any music fan. Teenage Kicks? Check. Marc Bolan? Check. Schoolgirl of the week? Let’s move on.

A gift for the budding Futurehead or Kaiser Chief, Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up And Start Again (Faber £16.99; offer £15.29) is a passionate account of Post Punk — not a movement exactly, but a gleefully chaotic period from 1978 to 1982 in which dub, funk, industrial and German electronic music meshed. Gang Of Four, Joy Division, Scritti Politti and the Specials jumped into the void. For fans of Jon Savage’s punk anthology England’s Dreaming, this is a natural companion.

Reynolds describes Dexys Midnight Runners’ new puritan spirit as “mirthless” yet reckons that their leader, Kevin Rowland, “oozed a weird charisma”. Surely Dexys had an intensity as political as it was musical: no beer at their gigs, a run every morning before rehearsal. Rowland even insisted that one member change his name to Giorgio Kilkenny. The fearsome Dear Leader wouldn’t talk to Richard White, which weakens Dexys Midnight Runners: Young Soul Rebels (Omnibus £16.95; offer £15.26), a tale of transatlantic No 1s and dogged self-destruction.

Eddi Fiegel’s Dream A Little Dream Of Me (Sidgwick & Jackson £18.99; offer £17.09) on the sensuous secret life of Mama Cass Elliot trumps Rob Jovanovic’s dry Kate Bush: The Biography (Portrait £16.99; offer £15.29). Elliott was gregarious in the extreme and any late 1960s Californian player seems to have partied with her but her sense of betrayal by her peers is poignant and Fiegel is all sympathy. The highlights of Jovanovic’s potentially rattling good tale of a definitive English eccentric are the quotes taken from 30 years of interviews: the author struggles even to sound like much of a fan. Bush should clearly write her own life story.

Donovan is more than happy to smoke his own. He’s undervalued, having bridged the gap between folk, jazz, and hallucinogenics and created the first psychedelic hit, Sunshine Superman, in 1966. Enjoyment of The Hurdy Gurdy Man (Century £17.99; offer £16.19) depends on how many references to “my friend John Lennon” you can stomach. Still, it is naive in its self-aggrandisement, cute even, and finds space to report that his Uncle John thought Don sang “I like treacle banana” on Mellow Yellow rather than the more leading “elec-trical banana”. But if you think Haight Ashbury is called Waight Asbury, your hippy-cool credentials start to look threadbare.

Britain’s greatest rock’n’roller, Billy Fury, has always been loaded with mystique: Bowie, Morrissey and Ian Dury have all declared their admiration. Spencer Leigh’s Wondrous Face (Finbarr International £9.99; offer £9.49) portrays a handsome kid, doomed to die young after contracting rheumatic fever at the age of seven. He smoked industrial quantities of grass and preferred the animals to people — unsurprising, as his slippery manager Larry Parnes cared for his finances so badly that Fury was bankrupt by the late 1970s.

It’s a slim book, a little too personalised, but any Fury obsessive will find something new. Likewise Elvis by the Presleys (Century £20; offer £18), which fetishises every Elvis artefact from a pair of NHS specs to his old Dansette. Chuck in a ton of family snapshots and you have something weirdly, but genuinely, moving.

A book that took a little more research is Mark Brend’s Strange Sounds (Backbeat £16.95; offer £15.26). Ever wondered what that solo was on Wild Thing, or exactly which keyboard sounds so stratospheric on the Tornados’ Telstar? That’ll be the ocarina and the clavioline. Chapters on Casiotones, sitars, and early drum machines are peculiarly absorbing — now we know that Robin Gibb pioneered the drum machine in pop, two years before Sly Stone and ten years before Rapper’s Delight.

For eye-popping, mind-melting detail and an incredible story, Andrew Sandoval’s The Monkees (Backbeat £16.95; offer £15.26) is the pick of the bunch. Four teenagers of negligible musical and acting ability are thrown together in 1966 to make a television series on a fictional band. They rebel, get their boss sacked, learn to play in six weeks, then release a multimillion selling album and a string of pop classics. Sandoval’ s diary entry format means that it’s all meat — their meteoric rise and fall in four years takes in the Beatles (who loved them), Jimi Hendrix (who supported them), Vietnam, Neil Young and Jack Nicholson. The Monkees defined pure pop and, if they hadn’t done it themselves in the self-lacerating Head, this would make a great movie. Somehow, a day-by-day account of McFly’s career won’t seem as alluring.

Dylanology: Richard Whitehead

Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s spellbinding documentary No Direction Home, Bob Dylan has enjoyed another year basking in the warm glow of a richly appreciative public. There is truly a golden tinge to the autumn of his career.

The success last year of Chronicles, his brilliant first volume of autobiography, has produced in its wake a slew of books, including the paperback version (Simon & Schuster £7.99; offer £7.59) for those who missed it first time.

If there are significant gaps in your Dylan library, you could do a lot worse than Dylan: Visions, Portraits, and Back Pages (Dorling Kindersley £18.99; offer £17.09), a magnificent collection of essays, reviews and photographs carrying the considerable critical weight of Mojo magazine.

The true Dylan disciple will hope to receive The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966 (Simon & Schuster £30; offer £26.99), a sumptuous companion to the documentary, complete with its own archive of handwritten lyrics, photographs, handbills and tickets — enough to keep any Bobhead drooling well into the new year.

The epic sweep of Dylan’s work is examined by the distinguished critic Greil Marcus in Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (Faber £12.99; offer £11.69), a trawl through his greatest song and its wider impact on pop culture.

Another handsome book that deals with the youthful icon is Forever Young (Da Capo Press £19.99; offer £17.99), featuring wonderful and previously unseen photographs taken in 1964 by DouglasR Gilbert. Dave Marsh provides the commentary.

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