The day the music was born: review of Electric Shock: From The Gramophone To The iPhone

The Bodley Head, £25

Review by Brian Morton

IN The Age Of Bowie, Paul Morley says that a great pop song represents a “future that already sounds like the past; a kind of instant heaven on earth”. It now turns out that another gobby northerner beat him to the punch. Writing in Radio Pictorial in 1936, JB Priestley said that because light music, unlike classical music, lacked serious content, “it acts as a series of vials, often charmingly shaped and coloured, for the distillation of memory. The first few bars of it remove the stopper; we find ourselves reliving, not remembering, but magically recapturing, some exact moments of our past”. And, for every Bowie or Miles Davis or Prince, who seemed obsessively committed to change but who became ever more readily identifiable with each change of costume, pop musicians themselves are not allowed a future, because their fans don’t want them to change. The long, sorry necrology of pop and rock, which ate up Buddy Holly and Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Sam Cooke, Elvis and John Lennon, and consigned many more to the death-in-life of Vegas and endless supper-club revival tours, is by no means incidental to the music’s history. We secretly prefer our pop stars to be dead, because that way they can’t surprise us with a change of style.

The indefatigable Peter Doggett (who’s also written at length about Bowie) begins his ambitious history with a personal recollection of just such a moment, the infamous “Judas” call that greeted Bob Dylan’s switch to electric folk-rock, but in terms of his whole chronological span that moment at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall (not the Albert Hall, as record buyers were once led to believe) is already halfway through the story. The current fashion for multiple subtitles slightly blunts the novelty of Doggett’s approach. The conventional view is that modern pop began when Elvis Presley entered Sun Studios in Memphis in July 1954 and recorded an old Arthur Crudup song. The fact that it was an older song is a reminder that there is always a regress in any art form and that it’s impossible to establish a starting point without resorting to the kind of nonsense that imagines Mozart or Liszt as “pop stars” or Shakespeare as the writer of EastEnders scripts.

Doggett wisely locates the origins of modern pop in music hall and vaudeville, even if this runs some risk of seeming to overlook the contribution of African-Americans, which comes into the story a little later. The Beatles came straight out of a Lancashire variety tradition. Midway through his account, Doggett says that by 1962, Anthony Newley “was arguably the world’s most versatile pop performer”, a claim made less controversial by use of the adverb and the relatively unarguable reference to versatility. The reference to Newley, who of course deeply influenced David Bowie and just about every other pop-rocker who opted to sing with a British accent, comes just below a discussion of Bobby Darin, a fascinating example of a totalising artist whose ambition seemed to have no borders. The message throughout Electric Shock is that the music is always in some sense secondary: to fashion, to screen image, to charisma, to a carefully confected personal mythology.

Like Morley, Doggett is perfectly comfortable with the artificiality and inauthenticity of pop. There is nothing new about the confected pop star. The X Factor is just a latter-day version of the old A&R man’s cry: “Find me four white boys with sharp haircuts! I’ve got a great song!” In the same way, the use of session musicians to cover the inadequacies of said boys, and of autotuning to make them sound less flat, isn’t incidental to the music’s history. It is of its essence. The point was clinched when Cher made Believe and Kylie made Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, two of the greatest pop songs ever. (Morley agrees, with the latter at least.)

Electric Shock moves quickly – 125 years in just 600 pages – and inevitably skates past some of the bigger questions. There isn’t much analysis of musical style, beyond occasional reference to whether the beat falls on the one and three or the two and four. And he makes some strange judgements, like the claim that Duke Ellington’s covering of songs from Mary Poppins was in some way “demeaning” to a great artist. Would he say the same about John Coltrane’s use of My Favourite Things and Chim Chim Cheree or Sun Ra’s reworking of Disney themes? But he does cover a great deal of ground and is alert to any potential charge that he only deals with American and European pop, and its occasional colonisation of forms like bossa nova, highlife and ska. What other pop history has ever made space for China’s troubled Zhou Yuan, who died in 1957, at just 38? He’s also wise enough, in a book about the confection of memories, to remind us that memory is untrustworthy. The biggest selling hit of 1966, midway through that enchanted decade of flower power, peace-and-love, tuning-in and dropping-out? Something sweet and psychedelic and anti-war? No, it was Barry Sadler’s jingoistic The Ballad Of The Green Berets. It probably still gets some rotation in Trump-voting homes. Pop’s magic vials also contain some less comfortable scents.