When you set about writing a book covering the whole history of pop music, you're bound to learn something. Here are three things …
The pre-rock era is overlooked
The early 50s are the seldom-visited relative of modern pop. There are swathes of No 1 and major stars that are all but forgotten: Guy Mitchell, Dickie Valentine, Eddies Fisher and Calvert, all of whom were once household names. Joe Meek certainly nabbed a lot of ideas from the early 50s – it pained me slightly to discover that John Leyton's Johnny Remember Me wasn't a wholly original piece of work, but largely a rewrite of Frankie Laine's 1952 single The Girl in the Wood. Laine, indeed, has become one of my heroes, for singles like Swamp Girl (as proto-Cramps as it sounds), the apocalyptic Blowing Wild, and his original, steel-bending version of Gene Pitney's I'm Gonna Be Strong.
Much of what came later in pop was created, or at least already in place, in the late 40s and early 50s – from the production auteur (Les Paul, Mitch Miller), to the slinky female pin-up (Lita Roza) to the barely capable talent show winner (David Whitfield). Other pointers to the modern pop age include Winifred Atwell, Britain's first black chart-topper in 1954; she ended up opening the country's first ever black hairdressers, and became landlady to Don Arden and Sharon Osbourne. There are so many unlikely links, anecdotes and musical clues in the early fifties, they deserve a book of their own
The ersatz often trumps the original
Some of the very best records have been made by pop fans rather than sonic originators. John Carter wrote and produced First Class's Beach Baby in 1973 not as a pastiche but to show, share and amplify his admiration for Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys; Roy Wood wanted to explain how much he loved the Beach Boys, Dion, Phil Spector, Neil Sedaka and possibly the sound of train whistles and fairground waltzers on the mind-warping Angel Fingers, all at the same time and all inside three minutes. I
I spent a long time trying to nail the argument that perceived "authenticity" – music with its roots ostentatiously showing, or employing signifiers of things that have already happened – was the enemy of progression in pop. But instead, I grew to realise that this conservative streak was a crucial ingredient, creating a friction that pop needed to move forward. I know in my heart that Aretha Franklin's I Never Loved A Man is no more emotionally significant than First Class's Beach Baby, Boston's More Than a Feeling, or the Monkees' I'm a Believer. But railing against snobbery was making for a dry and theoretical read, so I ditched it and learned to celebrate both sides, the forward thinkers and the conservatives.
The charts define pop
Well, not absolutely always, but they certainly count as accurate social documents. They can tell you exactly what people were listening to in 1971 (not Nick Drake), 1981 (not Arthur Russell) or 1991 (quite a lot of KLF). We can look at the 1977 and 1978 charts, or at the BBC4's intact Top of the Pops reruns and learn that commercially the biggest punk acts were Sham 69 and the Stranglers, something you would never guess from the endless punk documentaries made since the late 70s. But don't the charts exclude the avant garde? Hardly. Jethro Tull's Sweet Dream, David Essex's Rock On and Sly & Robbie's Boops were top 10 hits which (at the time, certainly) defied categorisation. Go back to the very first UK chart in 1952 and all forms of music are present (film themes, comedy songs, ballads, teen idol finger-snappers); the charts stayed that way for the best part of 50 years – all tastes catered for, no snob filter.
Since the music industry worked out how to get a new entry at No 1 every week in the late nineties, the charts haven't had quite the same democratic power, but Now That's What I Call Music carries on the good work, a compilation series which the writer Tom Ewing has called "the Wisdens of pop". A physical manifestation of public taste, Now compilations are released three times a year, and operate like a latterday Mass Observation project, recording social history for future generations. Writing Yeah Yeah Yeah has only enhanced my dedication to the Top 40 and to chart-related blogs like Tom's Popular and Marcello Carlin's Then Play Long – I came to realise it was a love I shouldn't be ashamed of.
• Yeah Yeah Yeah: the story of modern pop, by Bob Stanley, is published by Faber & Faber
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