I subsist on a pretty steady diet of books about pop music
because I like to help Psychobabble’s dear, dear pop-obsessed readers make
informed book purchases and because I’m a pop-obsessed reader too. Yet reading
book after book after book after book and The Beatles, Stones, Who, and so
forth, I do crave an invigorating break from the norm, something that ventures
beyond the usual bio, day-by-day diary, or song analysis.
Stuart Maconie mostly
hits the spot with The People’s Songs:
The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Songs based on his BBC 2 radio series.
Each chapter uses a particular very popular song (not necessarily a critically
acclaimed one) as an entry way into discussing a particular aspect of British
culture or history from World War II to the present. I say mostly because some of these chapters are typical of pop books. A
number of them cover familiar territory by address specific music genres: prog
(under the auspices of Tull’s “Living in the Past), psychedelia (Procol Harum’s
“A Whiter Shade of Pale”), skiffle (Lonnie Donegan’s version of “Rock Island
Line”), disco (The Bee Gee’s “You Should Be Dancing”), metal (“Sabbath’s
“Paranoid”), goth (The Cure’s “The Love Cats”… an atypically jolly example of
the genre), etc.
The People’s Songs
really gets interesting when it deals with Britain’s story beyond pop music,
when Maconie sets an exploration of the country’s Jamaican community on the
shoulders of Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop”, uses Bowie’s “Starman” and
Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” as examples of homosexuality’s mainstreaming in
a country where it had been outlawed as recently as 1967, establishes Wings’
“Give Ireland Back to the Irish” as a platform for a talk about The Troubles or
Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” as one for the Falklands War. Throughout it
all, Maconie presents himself as the people’s writer, chatting humorously,
entertainingly, evenhandedly, and mostly
informatively across all topics. This time I’m using mostly because there are a few lazy errors that may flag others I’m
too ignorant to recognize. For example, he repeats the myth that the Stones
were playing “Sympathy for the Devil” when Meredith Hunter was murdered at
Altamont, when any of the band’s fans can tell you they were really doing
“Under My Thumb”. More significantly, he partly includes The Tornadoes’
“Telstar” in his book for being the first British single to hit number one in
the States when that distinction actually belongs to Mr. Acker Bilk’s “Stranger
on the Shore”.
One might reasonably argue that a few boners like that are
acceptable in a book so busting with information, so broad in its musical and
cultural scope. For serious pop book readers, it may be the only one that gets
you skimming through the chapter built around The Beatles’ “She Loves You” and
sharpening your focus to read about how The Shamen’s house-music triffle
“Ebeneezer Goode” became a lightning rod for a government crackdown against
rave culture.
