Over Under Sideways Down

‘The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin’ – Jimmy Page

Alan Clayson has written the only full length account of the legendary British rock band, who evolved from the sleepy suburbs south of London in the 1960s to spawn three of the world’s greatest guitarists - Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

The Yardbirds had a string of international hits throughout the 1960s, including For Your Love, Shapes of Things and Over Under Sideways Down, and their improvisational on stage “rave-ups" became legendary. Although they were together for just five years, their reach has extended far into rock culture. Noted music historian Alan Clayson charts the band’s rise and changing line-up, from the pub and club circuit of the United Kingdom to rock/RnB immortality.

This study covers not just the group’s five years of frenetic activity in the sixties but also follows the subsequent careers of individual members. Page’s monumental success with Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton’s rise to guitar god and Beck’s formation of The Jeff Beck Group, as well as The Yardbirds' recent reformation, which sees original members Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty touring to packed auditoriums around the world. Long term fan and contemporary Clayson relates the story of this iconic British band with style and perception, placing them as pioneers of psychedelic rock and early hard rock.

This is an intimate and fascinating account not only of The Yardbirds themselves but also of an amazingly creative period of British music history. Many rock critics and historians aside from Clayson credit The Yardbirds' influence on generations of pop acts, right through to punk and the Britpop of the nineties.


'The Yardbirds were the first psychedelic band' - Jeff Beck

'There were four rock bands in the world that really counted, and The Yardbirds was one of them' - Simon Napier-Bell

Noted rock critic and author Alan Clayson has written many books on music - including the best-sellers Backbeat - subject of a major film - as well as studies of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. He has written for journals as diverse as The Guardian, Record Collector, Mojo, Folk Roots, The Times, The Independent, and, as a teenager, the notorious Schoolkids Oz. He is also an acclaimed songwriter and performance artist, both solo and fronting the legendary Clayson and the Argonauts.