It's a game of definitions. A bootleg is categorically not piracy. It's an easy thing to say, but to the majority of bootleggers, the idea that they would counterfeit an existing LP for commercial gain is an anathema. The purpose of the bootleg is to make available that which, for whatever reason, artist or record company has deemed unfit for normal release. It could be studio out-takes, unreleased tracks (Prince's infamous, heavily bootlegged Black Album) or (more often) a live show, but either way it is essentially a fan thing. Few artists or record companies can argue with any degree of authority that revenue is being stolen when they have no intention of issuing the material themselves - think of Dylan's on-going, Neverending Tour, of which only a handful of the 500 shows (in South America) have reportedly evaded the rolling tapes (often smuggled, we're told with some glee, inside boots).

The way Heylin tells it, jazz and particularly opera were the staples of early bootlegging, and the idea of a rock bootleg was a relatively late starter - Bob Dylan's Great White Wonder in 1969. Although never generally available, the early years were a goldmine for devotees with many of the first releases - The Beatles' Get Back, The Stones' LiveR Than You'll Ever Be (regarded by many as the definitive live document) - accessible in legitimate record stores. These early records showed a measure of care over their product - they were after all being produced by fans for aficionados; art student William Stout's lavish cartoon covers (many reproduced in here) were particularly prized.

The law and bootlegging have often made strange bedfellows, particularly when releases have the often tacit agreement of the bootlegged artist. Bruce Springsteen was one young performer whose early reputation was built on bootlegs of his infamous live shows by converts. John Lennon collected himself. But success breeds contempt, almost inevitably, and various purges, from within the industry and even up to the FBI, have put a crimp in the bootleggers art. The final section of Heylin's book does tend to find itself rather bogged down in legal niceties - trade-gap product, copyright inequities between countries, the pitfalls of CD product in the States and Far East.

That is, when the bootleggers were not being bootlegged themselves - the beauty of an unofficial recording is, of course, that no one is really in a position to complain if someone else chooses to copy it for their own ends. As Heylin points out, many johnny-come-latelies were simply building empires on the sweat of pioneers.

The best material in this book comes not unsurprisingly in the shape of shoe-string, highwayman anecdotes (Heylin collects interviews with many of those early exponents): The Final Option, a lunatic 150 copy/70 LP set of Led Zeppelin boots, for which the specially manufactured box turned out to be 2-LPs too small; a 1979 Bowie LP actually pressed and distributed by the BPI in a sting operation; the elaborate methods (basement taping, drugs) two practitioners went to record the precious unreleased acetates of a mysterious Englishman; the race in the mid-80s to prove the CD bootleg possible (it's now the norm).

In conclusion Heylin almost suggests a conspiracy. What price a record company, he asks, if real fans find more to excite them in this unofficial product than in the big, glossy official box-sets and insipid live LPs. He has a point. But the truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle, and while record companies continue to treat their artists like prima donnas (one, properly exploited LP every 3 years) no one can be really surprised if someone is enterprising enough to step in and fill the gap. The Great White Wonders is a valuable and absorbing testament to these tarnished Robin Hoods.