Electric Shock by Peter Doggett review – beyond cool, Mantovani, Van Halen and all

This fascinating history of ‘pop’ bravely widens the scope to offer a full panorama of 125 years

As pop music’s grip on young lives has weakened, along with its creative pulse and commercial clout, pop history has boomed. TV and radio schedules brim with documentaries, publishers’ lists with biographies, memoirs and ever more microscopic analyses of pop’s finest hours: books on New York’s post-punk years, the making of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Johnny Cash’s San Quentin concert are three recent (and illuminating) examples of the trend. Every stitch of what Jeff Bridges famously termed “rock’s rich tapestry” must, it seems, be unpicked.

It’s a brave writer who steps back to offer a wider narrative, let alone one that covers 125 years “from gramophone to iPhone”, as the subtitle of Electric Shock has it, but Peter Doggett is foolhardy enough for the task and carries it off with elan. His 700-page panorama is distinguished both by its scope – only Donald Clarke’s 1995 The Rise and Fall of Popular Music comes close – and a willingness to set aside critical point-scoring to confront the music the public actually bought and to ask what they got from it.

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