Review: 'The Yardbirds'

Despite never making a widely revered LP and hammering out only a handful of truly enduring 45s, The Yardbirds will always be remembered as one of the key British bands because they were the petri dish from which the country's three top blues guitarists—Clapton, Beck, and Page—sprouted. Of course, for those who care to really listen to what the group left behind, The Yardbirds are more than the sum of two truly innovative and electrifying musicians and one would-be B.B. King clone so overrated that acolytes proclaimed him "God" in graffiti all over London. And really, the majority of the Page-led era is pretty execrable. But the Beck-era Yardbirds were indeed one of the best rock bands of mid-sixties Britain, as a listen to "Heart Full of Soul","The Train Kept A-Rollin'", "Over Under Sideways Down", or "Roger the Engineer" will settle. For the quality of such records alone, The Yardbirds would be deserving of a biography of their very own.

Peter Stanfield's new book The Yardbirds, however, isn't really a biography. And for its first 65 pages, it's barely even a book about The Yardbirds, as it wallows in the old "what is and isn't authentic R&B" debate instead, which is just as tedious and pointless in 2025 as it must have been in 1965. Stanfield doesn't even weigh in on the debate, instead relaying some pretty trite opinions spewed in the vintage pages of Record Mirror, Rave, Melody Maker, and the like. 

Even when Stanfield's focus finally swings toward The Yardbirds the book's format mostly remains the same, primarily continuing as a survey of how the primitive sixties press viewed the group. I suppose this might be of interest to fans who would love to sift through a stack of yellowed music rags to find out how The Yardbirds were covered way back when but don't have the resources or patience. I'm guessing there might not be legions of those though. 

Naturally, we do learn a few things as The Yardbirds strolls on, such as how Keith Relf suffered a collapsed lung in 1963, how the band had an intense appreciation of/rivalry with The Who, how their lack of image impeded their success, how they had difficulty getting studio albums together, how their ambitions tended to outpace their productivity, and how members splintered off to form Cream, The Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin. And as the rock press grows up in 1966, we get more insightful blurbs, which illuminate the boys in the band and the band's history much better. However, when a book wastes half its page-count preserving insights like "the Yardbirds are the least groupy group on the entire pop scene" or "Everymody loves Yardbirds. Everymody loves Crawdaddy. Every Yardbird loves Crawdaddy" its purpose kind of eludes me.