So-called light music has its own values … it acts as a series of vials, often charmingly shaped and coloured, for the distillations of memory. The first few bars of it remove the stopper; we find ourselves re-living, not remembering but magically re-living, some exact moments of our past. J. B. Priestley (Location 553)
‘As Dickie Valentine I feel shy and handcuffed. It’s when I’m imitating others, when I’m not myself, that I can throw myself about the stage.’ You can almost hear Morrissey in that quote. If Dickie had emerged three years later, he might have made more interesting records. As it was, he only cut a handful – ‘Finger of Suspicion’ was the best, all waxed-moustache charm, a three-minute chat-up line, and it made number one in December ’54. Unable to shift with the rock ’n’ roll era, by 1971 he was reduced to haring around the country from one small nightclub to another. It was four in the morning, Dave and Ansell Collins’s ‘Double Barrel’ was number one, and he was doing 90 mph when he crashed and died on a single-lane bridge at Glangrwyney, Wales. He was forty-one. (Location 610)
What would fans of ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ have heard in its simple chant in 1952? They would have considered it a solid song, one you could directly relate to, with real history behind it. In America, country music served a similar purpose; later, metal would become a similarly solid, conservative pop strand. (Location 625)
There came a point where you realised you were a scholar with access to a personal, hand-built library rather than a rotten pupil who had been bunking off school to buy seven-inch singles. (Location 651)
They screamed for ‘Such a Night’, which he reprised, and reprised again. And he did this until you can hear girls shout ‘Johnnie!!’, at which point modern pop came alive. (Location 696)
Music was part of their identity, as were the coffee bars that had sprung up like bright formica flowers on most high streets since the Festival of Britain. (Location 741)
‘Rock around the Clock’ and Blackboard Jungle’s two-pronged assault effectively compacted white teenage self-assertion and black political justice; (Location 775)
The main source material for ‘Rock around the Clock’ was jump blues, which had been around since the mid-forties. Jump blues had utilised the big-band swing sound that had dominated the thirties and forties, stripped back the number of musicians, placed the saxophone at the front of the brass section, replaced croons with harsher blues vocals and shifted the guitar to the rhythm section. With all hands to the rhythm pump, the music literally began to jump. The lyrics were frequently filthy and a whole lot of fun. (Location 780)
