FILTER BOOKS

A subtly profound and wholly entertaining history of pre-rock pop.

By Danny Eccleston.

More please: Peggy Lee, “warm, funny, entirely death-haunted”.

Getty

Let’s Do It: The Birth Of Pop

★★★★★

Bob Stanley

FABER & FABER. £25

L AMENTS THAT we are living in the Last Days Of Rock, or perhaps the Rock’n’Roll Era, are staples of the MOJO post bag. Yet as long as music is bought and sold, there will be Pop. Writer and Saint Etienne muso Bob Stanley – who has never seemed to set much store by ‘rock’ – takes the long view. In the geological span of pop, rock is a blip, and Stanley’s latest book – which dares to tell the story of commercia music from roughly the 1890s to roughly the 1960s – gets deep into its strata.

If Stanley’s previous tome, the widely-admired Yeah Yeah Yeah, had a weakness it was that much of its ground was (for MOJO readers, at least) well-trodden. And though his take on the ’60s, say, contained many priceless aperçus – the role of the end of National Ser vice in the UK beat boom, for instance – and an effort was made to sprint past the more obvious signposts (The Beatles were afforded nine pages out of 700-odd) it was at its best when appraising the least ‘cool’ and most commercial – David Cassidy, or Tight Fit – where Stanley had the most original things to say.

“He alights on early pathfinders as eccentric as any Phil Spector.”

Let’s Do It may be the tougher sell – Franz Lehár? Bing Crosby? Really? – but it’s the better book, because so many of its topics feel under-analysed and revelations – like the impact of 1907’s British music hall strike – arrive on ever y page. Stanley is great at nailing what made artists like Crosby popular but also timeless. His chapter on Peggy Lee is a door swinging open on a rich and rewarding catalogue that ends with the quirky genius of Is That All There Is. Exemplifying his feel for what is multi-dimensional in even the poppiest pop, Stanley calls the record “warm, funny and entirely death-haunted”.