As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of opening the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Doggett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular. What music did people like? Why did they like it? What did it bring to their lives?
Doggett has previously written books about Bowie, the Beatles and 1960s counterculture, all with very long titles that suggest deep learning and limited readability. I’m not sure I have read him before, but he is actually rather good: an enthusiast and a thinker who seems to have heard everything, and has something new to say about a lot of it. He came to this project, he admits, with a bad case of rock critic snobbery:
My first task in writing this book was to throw away decades of prejudice, however well argued and intelligently phrased. That is how I found myself, for the first time in my life, hearing (to seize some names at random) Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Mantovani, Queen, Kylie Minogue and Metallica with genuine appreciation, rather than closing my mind as soon as I saw their names.
But while we give thanks for such humility, we may also feel intimidated by the sheer scale of his project.
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