I remember reading about a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, who used to spend Saturday mornings lurking in the Vintage Record Centre on Roman Way in North London. He would watch the old Teds and the young rockabillies, the dandified fifties revivalists and the single middle-aged men walk through the door, thumb through the racks, and all ask for the same record: ‘Do you have “Cast Iron Arm” by Peanuts Wilson?’ The answer was always no. The kid was in awe of this record. It must, he figured, be the best record ever made. What could it sound like? Who was Peanuts Wilson? Why was the arm made of cast iron? This would have been in the mid-seventies and there was no way he could find out the answers to these questions, or even get to hear the record because it was so rare, and so in demand. He dreamed about it, tried to imagine how it might sound: harder than ‘Hound Dog’, sharper than ‘Summertime Blues’. For this kid, in its magical elusiveness, ‘Cast Iron Arm’ embodied the wonder of pop music.
In the twenty-first century anyone can type the name Peanuts Wilson into YouTube or Spotify or iTunes and hear ‘Cast Iron Arm’, with its honking sax, comic interludes and thunking backbeat. The same goes for the rarest British hard-rock album,Growers of Mushroom by Leaf Hound. Or ‘Carry Me Home’, a still unreleased Beach Boys outtake from theirHolland album. This wasn’t possible in the pre-digital age, when information was passed around pop fans via music papers and radio shows, fanzines, cassettes and word of mouth – analogue technology, airwaves, printing presses, everything in perpetual motion. Before the arrival of Napster in 2000, the gateway for iTunes, it had been this way for the best part of five decades: this was the modern pop era.
There have been many great music books written since 2000, on genres, micro-genres, single albums, even single songs. But there hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been a book on the whole of modern pop’s development, none to explain when and why things happened, the connections, the splinters, what has been lost or forgotten along the way.
My intention withYeah Yeah Yeah is to give the reader a feel for pop’s development as it happened, by drawing a straight line – with the odd wiggle and personal diversion – from the birth of the seven-inch single to the decline of pop music as a palpable, physical thing in the nineties. Chronologically, I will explore how each new era brought with it new icons and iconoclasts, the arrival and excitement of hot sounds, and how, when they began to cool off, several different styles developed and myriad subgenres were created.
From the fifties to the nineties, pop was personal and private. You could live in its wider world but also shape it to your own ends by amassing a collection of vinyl, making tapes of singles in the order you wanted to hear them, then passing on the secret to fellow travellers. I had exercise books in which I’d write down the new Top 20 every Tuesday: at 12.45 we’d have the radio on at school, and friends huddled together to find out whether the heroic Altered Images had dislodged the dreadful Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin from the top of the chart. It was a religion. I didn’t feel the need to go to church.
My first published work was in a fanzine calledPop Avalanche in 1986. I sent a copy to theNew Musical Express and they sent me off to review a Johnny Cash show in Peterborough. Since 1990, I’ve been fortunate enough to see the pop world from both sides, as a fan, a writer, and also as a member of a pop group: I was twenty-five when Saint Etienne started, and we had the remarkable good fortune to appear onTop of the Pops, on the cover of theNME and on stage around the world. For the last dozen years I have written forThe Times and theGuardian, which has given me the opportunity to interview stars and – equally important to me – to shine some light on records, singers, writers and producers who I thought were undeservedly obscure.
This book picks up the
