All subscribers to the Boom Boom book newsletter were sent Newsletter 7 on Jan 16th. Do check your spam folder as sometimes these mail-outs do end up being sent there by your email system!
In the meantime the photo above shows the full colour digital proof of the book which was checked and signed off last week. At this stage these proofs are for checking that each page is correctly orientated for each folio which as you can see can be a little confusing!
There is still plenty of time to place a pre-release order to ensure you get the book before anyone else has stock.
We are very pleased to be able to announce that after a long wait, Pre-Orders for Boom Boom Boom Boom – The Blues Photographs of Brian Smith have now opened. The book is currently with the printers and it is planned to ship in January 2025. Pre-ordered copies will be mailed in the order in which we get them and you will get them ahead of any other supplier (including you know who). There is a discount for pre-orders on our official shop as well, the link below goes direct to the order page.
PDF copies have been going out to book reviewers and one of the first to cover it was Bob Bell at the excellent 78 Crazy website he runs. Bob knew Brian and Roger Eagle back in the day, and writes movingly about the scene back then and memories prompted by the photographs. The link below takes you direct to the review but do also take some time to explore other aspects of his website once you have read it!
If anyone has problems ordering through our shop, then two recommended UK online retailers who support indie publishers and shops are Hive.co.uk and uk.Bookshop.org. Just quote our ISBN and they will be able to take an order. We use them for our own book buying when we cannot get to town. Do feel free to hassle Waterstones who can also order our titles but refuse to carry them in store!
Here’s another spread from the book, Chuck Berry in animated conversation with one of Brian’s friends backstage and later larking about in his mate’s car before they all went out for dinner. The other page shows The Chants, one of whom later founded The Real Thing.
As we are about to send out updated press releases, Brian Smith’s Boom Boom photo book cover has had a little more time spent on it, in particular cleaning up the edges of the cut-out images which had been done only roughly until now. If you are wondering who is who on the cover, that’s Screaming Jay Hawkins on the far right with Brian Smith himself joining in the fun, taken by one of Brian’s mates; I wanted to sneak Brian onto the cover if we could! Little Richard in the centre is a star more people might recognise. I realised a few days ago we ought to try and get John Lee Hooker onto the front too, so tweaked things to enable this and fitted him next to Little Richard. On the left is Buddy Guy. The main cover photograph is of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Several of these images were taken inside the Twisted Wheel Club, one of Brian’s regular haunts
Another of Brian Smith’s great images. But for once is NOT shown in the Brain Smith Blues Photo Book! Why you may ask? Well, when we first began investigating Brian’s material it quickly became clear that his archive fell into two distinct phases. There was the collection of black and white blues photographs made up to around 1966. Then there was his second phase of work which began after a period away from photography, when he moved into colour in the 1970s. This was also very extensive and covers a longer period as well. So we decided to tackle the mono work first and if there is enough interest, and we feel there might be, a follow up of the colour work might be on the cards. But in the meantime, Brian continues to work with blues labels on their reissues and this striking new CD sleeve is from JSP Records uses Brian’s colour photos on the front and back inlays, and the booklet inside. So we thought we’d show it off here anyway! It’s a scary thought that while we sort of looked upon this material as modern when deciding on the book contents, these shots are already over thirty years old. What was it Cher sang about turning back time? Thanks to Brian and JSP for the artwork scans.
There have been quite a few emails coming in this last week or so asking why, if another website is busy announcing a new release date for one of our next titles, do we not have that information here? The answer is simple, we did not know about this! The website did not bother to contact us to check. So rest assured, as soon as we have a reliable production date for each of our next three titles it will appear here BEFORE anywhere else! Likewise if you order direct from us (once pre-orders go live) you will get the book BEFORE anyone else (that includes you know who) has stock.
And just to prove things are happening, here’s a peek at a chunk of the Fire In The Sky page layouts (generated from within the layout software) which are being proofed and photo cleared at present. Our designer has added a colour coding to each section to make navigating what is becoming an increasingly complex document (there are over 700 images) a little easier!
Again our apologies for a rather quiet spell at Easy On The Eye Books, with yet more illness affecting senior staff. I guess the clue is in the word senior! As a result we’ve rejigged plans a little, and our next planned release now we’re running with the baton again will be the fabulous blues photograph book. This is not far from final proofing, but got held up again when photographer Brian Smith found yet more negatives while clearing out his garage a while ago. We have now scanned and cleaned this new batch of material and are sorting through, as some of the photographs deserve to go in the book. Brian had a few old prints of some of these but naturally we’ll be able to get much better reproduction from the negatives. Here is one of the new found frames (BEFORE being cleaned!), which was actually taken by one of Brian’s friends, and shows him with Bo Diddley backstage at (I think) the Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester. Bo is holding his trademark Gretsch ‘Jupiter Thunderbird’.
Nice to see some of Brian Smith’s photographs used properly and with permission on a new Blues CD. The disc in question is a compilation put together by Wilko Johnson from the Chess label archives, and is designed to present his fans with the sort of material which inspired him as a young guitarist. Titled The First Time I Met The Blues, it is out now on Chess – SPECXX2114. Looking at the cover (below), I can see at least three of Brian’s photographs in there! If you’re not up to speed, the material is from our upcoming book “Boom Boom Boom Boom : The Photographs of Brian Smith. American Rhythm & Blues in England 1962-1966“. And there isn’t a time I type all that when I don’t wonder a] how we ended up with such a long title and b] how on earth I can fit it all on the spine…
Talking of “Boom Boom” I managed to screw up the newsletter subscription form for this title, so prior to the date of this posting, if you thought you had subscribed, the software did not capture your details. I have corrected this and retested it, so if you go the the main page about the book, and hit the new button, it will all function properly. That way we can keep you fully up to date on the project and any special editions, etc.
I am meeting up with Brian in a few days to sort out the last of the hi-res scans for the book and caption them up properly.
Vintage Rock magazine is one of those fascinating niche music monthlies which make choosing at Smiths so hard these days. They cover the 50s and 60s in detail, with plenty of emphasis on the UK scene back then and so when they heard about Brian Smith’s Blues photo book were keen to interview him and show some of his photographs. The magazine is out now, Issue 25 (April / June) and well worth a look, although it tends to be stocked only by the bigger magazine outlets (though you can buy it direct from the publishers.) Thanks to Rik and Jack at Vintage Rock for permission to reproduce a couple of pages from the article. The shot here is one of a series Brian took from the side of the stage during a Rolling Stones concert… what an experience!
The book of Brian Smith’s fabulous Sixties Blues photographs – Boom Boom Boom Boom – is pushing along nicely, albeit a little behind schedule! But we’re pleased to be able to show the first page visuals at last. Brian has also had some of his photographs selected for a really interesting new documentary on some of the Blues sidemen who perhaps never got the recognition of some of their peers. Titled Sidemen : The Long Road To Glory, you can see an exclusive trailer for the project at the producer’s official Vimeo site. Universal have also requested a dozen of his images for an upcoming Chess blues box set. If you haven’t yet checked the book out, you can read the full details on the site.
easy on the eye books 