Ever since I completed my Ph.D., I’ve read academic books and articles backwards, starting with their bibliographies. A good bibliography almost always means a good book. What interests me here is not the quantity of an author’s reading but its character. Their bibliography maps the conversations in which they are engaged.
Franz Nicolay’s study of ‘life and work in popular music’ contributes, then, to long-running discussions of music-making as a particularly interesting – and complex – kind of social activity. His bibliography documents the history of music ethnographies, from the foundational work of Alfred Schütz and Howard Becker, through the close observation of various music-making settings by Robert Stebbins, Robert Faulkner, H. Stith Bennett, Ruth Finnegan, Sara Cohen, Bruce MacLeod, Paul Berliner, Deena Weinstein, and Timothy Taylor.
Nicolay makes excellent use of this scholarly tradition, although his own research involves talking to musicians about their professional lives rather than watching them at work. Band People is based on interviews with 69 musicians; none of them are particularly famous, although many have worked in well-known bands. Nicolay lists his interviewees by name at the end of the book, and more information here would have been helpful: the musicians’ ages, locations, and bands by whom they had been employed, for example. He does note which instruments they played. The majority of his interviewees were drummers (19), bassists (11), guitarists (8), and keyboard players (7). Otherwise, there were a few string, wind, and brass players; two or three multi-instrumentalists; and a scattering of musicians who doubled up – singing as well as playing an instrument, for example.
These numbers reflect the genre in which Nicolay is primarily interested: contemporary rock. In this musical world, bands tend to be led and/or defined by their singers; Nicolay’s ‘band people’ are musicians brought in to complicate a band’s rhythmic drive from underneath, as it were, while adding harmonic interest to the melodies on top. They are essential to a band’s sound, but they don’t define it; their careers overlap with a band’s history but don’t shape it.
This is to draw attention to another strand of Nicolay’s bibliography: books on musicians’ careers, non-academic biographies, and autobiographies. These have long been used by academic music historians, but Nicolay’s selection of music-makers is particularly (and entertainingly) eclectic: The Pogues, Belle and Sebastian, Duke Ellington, Levon Helm, Jimmi Mayes, Drew Page, Jacob Slichter, W. O. Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Tanner, Fred Wesley, and Tom Petty. Nicolay trawls their books for supporting evidence of the themes that shape his own chapters: band organisation; musicians’ training and early goals; the social life of bands; the work of band people; family business (musicians with children); artists and artisans; money and credit; conflict; and peers and ambitions.
Having read a vast number of pop and rock bios for my own research purposes, I can say with confidence that Nicolay’s topics are not the ones that usually organise their narratives and, if only for that reason, Band People, in its concern for sidemen and women rather than the stars, is an important and illuminating book. I do wonder, though, whether treating bands as ‘work teams’ – Nicolay’s bibliography noticeably features organisational and management theory texts – does justice to these musicians’ understandings of their craft skills, their sense of their own creativity and musical authority. Being in a band has to be understood performatively as well as organisationally, in terms of social psychology as well as management science (Erving Goffman is not in the bibliography).
The point here is that the rock band (The Beatles, it seems, are still the ideal type) is unlike other collective music-making entities, whether bluegrass or boy bands, folk or chamber groups, grime or rap acts. As Adam Behr has argued, its commercial and aesthetic identity as a band is a key to how a rock group’s music is heard. On the one hand, its music is understood as integrating authenticity and sociability; on the other hand, its performance of that music is understood as integrating studio recording and live performance. This is a musical world in which band people’s basic work is touring an album (Behr Reference Behr2014). Nicolay brilliantly uses his interviews to illustrate the complexities of this situation – financial, reputational, and artistic – for musicians whose membership of a band involves passing through it.
In a recent interview in The Guardian, the British musician Daniel Blumberg (winner of the 2025 Oscar for his soundtrack for The Brutalist) remarks that whenever he signed with a label, they would want him to make a series of albums. To Blumberg, that was ‘the definition of hell’. He remembers talking to the director Lars von Trier: ‘It was a really important conversation with Lars. He said: “I don’t understand bands. They sign a contract for three albums to work with the same people,” and he was like: “I would never do that with films.” You build a team for each thing you do’ (Hattenstone Reference Hattenstone2025).
This resonated with my reading of Band People: Nicolay’s band musicians join teams for specific projects (a tour, say), but they don’t ‘join the band’. Bands aren’t teams; they are defined by the work of ‘the same people’. I thought of Nicolay’s interviewees too when watching Bernard MacMahon’s fine film, Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025), which shows how the band was story-boarded just like a Lars Von Trier picture! Jimmy Page did build a team: the two leading London studio musicians on guitar and bass with a singer and drummer who were still working their way up the live West Midlands pub band scene. He thereby created the very model (commercially and aesthetically) of an authentic rock band.
Led Zeppelin lasted 12 years – John Bonham’s death meant the end of the team and therefore the project, the band. John Paul Jones went back to being a band musician, a ‘labourer in the culture industry’, and my musical hero. For Franz Nicolay, all such musicians are heroes and heroines, and his book pays them proper tribute.
