The Sound With The Pound: An Anthology Of 60s Mersey Beat Groups
by Manfred Kuhlmann

He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!

You can tell that Manfred Kuhlmann has been working on The Sound With The Pound for several years, because the foreword is written by Johnny Guitar from Rory Storm & The Hurricanes. Guitar sadly died 10 years ago, while this book’s punning title was devised by Cavern DJ Bob Wooler, who himself passed away in 2002.

Based in Germany, Kuhlmann has been commuting to Liverpool, collecting information from every beat group member he could find. His crowded fabric desperately needs an index or some form of cross-referencing, though, as so many musicians played in several groups. If you wanted the musical history of the drummer Aynsley Dunbar, say, it’s a needle-in-a-haystack job to locate his bands.

Ironically, Kuhlmann’s problem isn’t the distance from his sources, but more that he doesn’t know what to do with the information that he’s collated. There’s little attempt to make the essays readable, and his stodgy text often misses the story. Kuhlmann writes about 150 groups for which recordings or acetates exist, though, and, much to his credit, he only spends six pages on The Beatles!

ISBN 9781906349127, 436 pages

Reviewed by Spencer Leigh
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