The power of cheap music: pop podcast round-up

Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music can be. Its potency, however, is not innate. Amanda Prynne, from Coward’s Private Lives, would not have been especially struck by ‘Some day I’ll Find You’ had it been playing on a wireless in a shop; its impact came from hearing it as she again encountered her ex-husband. For cheap music to be potent, context is everything. Without a wider meaning, a cheap little pop song is just notes and chords. With meaning, the most throwaway frippery can become an object of fascination.

That’s often true of the best known of songs.‘All You Need Is Love’, for example, would be a trite and condescending nursery rhyme without the existence of the worldwide TV broadcast, or the tenor of its times. If you just look at the bare facts — how it was recorded, how long it took to write and so on — it becomes another dull song.

That much becomes evident listening to an array of podcasts that have considered songs as individual artefacts, rather than bricks in the wall of an artist’s career.