There are, however, as with the music, a smattering of rock’n’roll and pop music books that are every bit as intense, lasting and significant as the chords, notes and singing that inspired them. On the overseas front we look to the work of writers such as Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, Jon Savage, and Nick Kent as yardsticks. Or maybe it’s the late and great Lester Bangs who could make books on Blondie and Rod Stewart essential, literate rock commentary. Bangs could hammer out 80,000 words ostensibly on The Troggs in which he hardly mentions the band or their records but manages sublimely (albeit chaotically) to capture the pure essence of why rock’n’roll has defined and reflected almost four generations of youth.

Australasia has produced relatively few rock’n’roll books of note. There’s Clinton Walker’s biography of AC/DC singer Bon Scott entitled Highway To Hell and his more recent Stranded which looks at Australian independent music between 1977 and 1991. Add to this Billy Thorpe’s surprisingly insightful and evocative Sex And Thugs And Rock’n’Roll, Vivien Johnson’s Radio Birdman and now Chris Bourke’s exhaustive look at Crowded House and you’re pretty much there.

On the surface, as with Walker’s Bon Scott book, the idea of reading almost 400 pages on Crowded House might not seem all that exciting to anyone bar the most obsessive of the band’s fans. Let’s face it, the ‘two dorks and a dictator’ as a member once described them, made some of the most sublime pop/rock’n’roll of the last twenty years but their story never, at least as a casual observer, seemed all that fascinating. The core trio – Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Paul Hester – were likeable characters but one would have thought hardly in the league of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, The Who and countless others when it came to the subject matter for a long book.

The fact that Bourke makes the Crowded House saga so readable and fascinating is testament to his abilities. Something So Strong is meticulously researched and gains from the obvious access he had to all of the key players in the band's career. There’s material in the book’s pages that obviously won’t delight the participants but it’s testament to their attitude and confidence in the author that we're not presented with a sanitised version of the story, as was the case with Toby Creswell’s Too Much Ain't Enough which purported to be the ‘real’ story of Jimmy Barnes. What really lifts Something So Strong to the level of a world-class music book is the behind–the–scenes material and analysis of the machinations of the music industry. The book functions as an examination of what Joni Mitchell once called ‘the star-making machinery behind the popular song’. In minute detail Bourke looks at the marketing and promotion of Crowded House, the major players, their strengths and foibles, the effect record company changes had on the band’s career, the interaction between the band members and their Australian and American managers, the struggles over videos, singles, cover art, touring schedules and the myriad of other elements that all need to fall into place for a band to scale the heights that Crowded House did. As such it’s an essential read not only for fans but for anyone struggling to comprehend or fascinated by the vagaries of creating hit records.

This book is a superior piece of writing about popular music, one that successfully melds the story of the disparate personalities of the musicians with the blow-by-blow detail of how they interacted with the business side of the industry. What emerges is an engaging book about people, politics and pop that will stand as one of the yardsticks by which writing about popular music in Australasia will be measured for years to come. With a slew of rock’n’roll-orientated titles promised over the next year by a number of major publishing houses we can only hope that there’s at least a couple with the readability, spark and depth of analysis that Something So Strong exudes.