The beatles

On 19 June 1948, the modern LP was unveiled at a press conference by the Columbia Records president Ted Wallerstein, who, as Billboard magazine reported, ‘demonstrated listening qualities of both 10- and 12-inch vinyl microgroove platters’. The company issued Frank Sinatra’s long-player, The Voice of Frank Sinatra, a week later. The title of David Hepworth’s new book might therefore imply a starting point of 1948 — similar to the approach taken by Travis Elborough’s excellent 450-page history of the album, The Long Player Goodbye (2007) — but Hepworth’s book is both narrower and more autobiographical, largely confined to the years 1967 to 1982. Following on from last year’s collection of

We’ve had Alan Johnson the lad from the slums of north Kensington, Alan Johnson the postman and Alan Johnson Member of Parliament and cabinet minister. Now comes the sequel: Alan Johnson the rock and roll years. Actually, it’s not quite a sequel since it covers much of the same territory as two of the previous volumes, albeit from a slightly different angle. Although Johnson went on to hold five cabinet posts, politics was never part of Johnson’s life plan. All he ever wanted to be was a rock star and, who knows, it was an ambition he might have realised but for the fact that his musical instruments kept being

For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up there with Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson, Goffin and King, Holland, Dozier and Holland, and Bacharach and David. The hits he wrote for Glen Campbell alone earned him his place in the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Galveston’ and of course ‘Wichita Lineman’, the dying fall of which — ‘And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time’ — is so perfect that I am fighting back tears even as I type it. The song was written in

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a film in the 1960s — champagne, drugs, threesomes, gangsters, a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, hula-hooping girls and Pucci scarves flung over smears of vomit. Underneath, however, lies an intellectual question. The film is an adaptation of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, a story about obsessively trying to understand the secret key that unlocks an author’s work: ‘The idea that governs the whole and gives it meaning… a string that my pearls were strung on.’ (Ought I admit that I enjoyed Quinn’s saucy 1960s screenplay, spliced between chapters of the

‘It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it,’ sang the Desperate Bicycles on their self-funded debut single in 1977, summing up the punk belief that you didn’t have to be the world’s best musician before getting up on stage or making a record. Twenty years earlier, a previous generation learned a similar message from the skiffle explosion, which put guitars in the hands of many future members of the key British rock groups of the Sixties. It therefore seems appropriate that a musician first inspired by seeing The Clash has eventually written a book about skiffle. Billy Bragg has a long-standing interest in the genre, and his passion

It might seem an odd choice, but after reading Jon Savage’s new book, I think if I had a time machine I’d now be tempted to set its controls for 13 January 1966 and the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Andy Warhol had been booked to give a speech, but instead he put on a gig by the Velvet Underground and Nico at full uncompromising blast, with a couple of Factory favourites dancing alongside them. One shrink described the evening as a ‘torture of cacophony’; another — no less disapprovingly — as an ‘eruption of the id’. A third left hurriedly, with the explanation that

Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon, seen through the prism of Kevin Barry’s imagining. Barry’s first novel, The City of Bohane, was a dystopian nightmare of comic vernacular and violence, showered with praise and prizes. Think James Joyce and Flann O’Brien collaborating on a script for Tarantino. Beatlebone, his second novel (on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths prize for fiction) has Lennon fleeing New York in 1978 for a secret visit to Dorinish, the uninhabited island he bought 11 years earlier. Burned-out, creatively blocked, he craves a few days of solitude, to sit and stare at

Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the same rigour and vigour into film and music and literature as once went into conquering continents? Is there a residual colonialist bias in our arts, seen, for instance, in our cinematic penchant for creating patriotic period dramas such as Henry V or The King’s Speech? How much of our cultural success depends on the US market and the accident of a shared language? To what extent does our cultural expression reflect not our idea of ourselves but an American distortion? Do international smash hits such as Julian Fellowes’s languid TV

As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of opening the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Doggett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular.