In 2012 the Finnish documentary film The Punk Syndrome, about the learning-disabled punk rock group Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät (Pertti Kurikan's Name Day), won the Audience Award at the Tampere Film Festival, as well as awards in Moscow and the Czech Republic. The following year it won the Film Audience Award at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas, and was awarded the Finnish state art prize. The film shows footage of two of the band members in the toilet and the shower, and presents a no-holds-barred view of their disabilities, as well as their performances, and their irascible relationship when touring (they have toured Germany, Lithuania and other parts of Europe, and were due to tour the UK last year until they discovered all they were being offered was a promotional visit for two band members). Last summer they played some 30 gigs, mostly at festivals in Finland, and shared a stage with their idols Mötorhead. The singer, Kari Aalto, writes his own lyrics about the everyday life of a disabled person living in a halfway house – ‘Asuntolaelämää’ (Dormitory Living), as well as songs with titles such as ‘Päättäjä on pettäjä’ (Policymakers Betray Us) and ‘Osaa eläimetkin pieree’ (Animals Know How to Fart, Too). The guitarist is the eponymous Pertti Kurikan, and the group have become celebrities in Finland, hanging out with prominent politicians such as the Minister for Culture and Left Alliance Chairman, Paavo Arhinmäki. As their bass player Sami Helle puts it: ‘Now people tend talk to me as Sami, not as some guy with a disability’ (Tolonen Reference Tolenen2013). I mention this because one of the few defects of George McKay's book, Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability, which is ground-breaking in other ways (it forms part of an extensive series of books about disability, rather than music), is its exclusively Anglo-American focus – and of course Canadian, in the case of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and one or two others. This could be partly due to the strictures of a US publisher.

McKay only once strays into Australasian territory, mentioning in a footnote NZ ‘godfather of punk’ Chris Knox's 1989 album Seizure, but not his more recent much-publicised stroke, the subject of a tribute album released in 2012. Jim Conway is also a notable omission: a celebrated Australian blues musician diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983, who filled in on harmonica with great distinction for the late Sonny Terry on an Australian tour by Brownie McGhee in 1996, and played at the Sydney Paralympics Opening Ceremony in 2000. This was a rather more low-key performance than the Graeae Theatre Company's performance of Ian Dury's anthem to his disability, ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, when the crowd voiced the chorus at the London Paralympics in 2012, which McKay highlights on p. 50. There is also a paucity of deaf musicians McKay is able to summon up, occasioning considerable concentration on Johnnie Ray, an ‘emo’ before his time, who was also bisexual (and thus a key figure in Jake Arnott's novel/TV series The Long Firm), in tribute to whom Morrissey once wore a hearing aid on stage. McKay might also have considered Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who although not strictly speaking a ‘popular’ musician, has achieved considerable celebrity and attention through her sensing of the vibrations of music through her feet. The one occasion I saw her perform the music of New Zealand composer Gareth Farr at the Sydney Opera House was a disturbing experience, as she wore a heavy yoke on her shoulders loaded up with various percussion instruments, which gave her the appearance of a ‘slave to the rhythm’.

McKay was on a visiting fellowship at Sydney University in 2008, and gave a much acclaimed and remembered lecture based on his extensive work on Ian Dury in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, which forms the basis of the book's opening chapter, ‘Crippled with Nerves’, dovetailing Dury with Neil Young and Steve Harley, all polio survivors. More on Dury is included in the article which McKay published in a special issue on music and disability of Popular Music that he edited with Nicola Dibben in Reference McKay and Dibben2009, which also included essays on Connie Boswell, Johnnie Ray, Ian Curtis, Station 17 in Hamburg, and an examination of songs and lyrics from the Disability Arts Movement in Britain. Dury has become a classic case in disability studies, as the 2010 film with Andy Serkis, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, shows conclusively. Shortly after McKay's Sydney lecture, I was asked to review a journal article on four ‘biopic’ films, which included the Dury film, Control, about Joy Division, and Ray, the film about Ray Charles (I forget the fourth). Given that three of the four films were about singers with disabilities, and the author had neglected to mention the subject at all, I was able to mobilise my new-found awareness.

One of the most potent aspects of this book is precisely that: it forces the reader into an awareness of the prominence of disability in music, along with its near-invisibility in the music industry. Joni Mitchell, for example, was someone I had never associated with being a polio survivor, and although numerous blues singers were blind, crippled or otherwise disabled, which enabled them to be musicians rather than having to do physical work, awareness of the widespread ‘cripping’ of popular music, as McKay calls it, is not something usually dwelt on. McKay includes welcome case studies of Robert Wyatt and Ian Curtis, and also ventures into areas not usually associated with disability studies – the deafening aspects of contemporary music volume, and the disabling effects of the music industry. Having recently experienced the ear-injuring (and totally pointless, in my view) volume of My Bloody Valentine, I can relate to this, although McKay might also have mentioned the frighteningly ear-splitting moments which used to occur in Mogwai's concerts as well, along with citing Slade's literally ear-nailing 1981 album Til Deaf Do Us Part. His suggestion that ‘iPod buds … have arguably removed the stigma of unsightliness arguably associated with hearing aids’ (p. 148) is not quite convincing, but his study of the ‘destructive economy’ of the popular music industry and its casualties such as Amy Winehouse and the ‘27 club’ of early deaths in rock'n’roll is on surer ground. This also takes us into the damaged territory of ‘outsiders’ such as Daniel Johnstone and Kevin Coyne, before a section on disability activism in popular music leads us into the final section, ‘Shakin's All Over’, which you can see McKay reading aloud on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVi_ub2NnPA). Promising us an ‘upbeat’ ending, McKay reveals he himself has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, or ‘progressive muscular dystrophy’ (p. 193), before sharing with us a surprising epiphany he experiences at a Stevie Wonder concert in Manchester, which convinces him conclusively that ‘the world still needs shaking up’. This important book also includes an impressive number of photos, many from the author's own collection.