Bob Stanley: Charting the birth of pop

Bob Stanley’s 2013 book Yeah Yeah Yeah was a vast undertaking, covering the history of modern pop music from the first UK chart in 1952 to the start of the digital age. Now, nine years later, he has produced a companion volume, Let’s Do It, tracing the birth of pop from the start of the 20th century all the way through to the easy listening boom of the 1970s.
Bob Stanley, whose new book Let's Do It charts the birth of pop. Picture: Alistair McLellanBob Stanley, whose new book Let's Do It charts the birth of pop. Picture: Alistair McLellan
Bob Stanley, whose new book Let's Do It charts the birth of pop. Picture: Alistair McLellan

The 57-year-old musician and journalist – who is one third of the pop group Saint Etienne and now lives in Saltaire – says the idea for the new book actually began formulating while he was writing the early chapters of Yeah Yeah Yeah. “It was very obvious to me that there was a pre-story that I was kind of glossing over because I had to, otherwise it would’ve just gone on forever,” he says. “I was really intrigued by the period between the end of the Second World War and rock ’n’ roll which is dismissed as a lame period, where people like Frankie Laine were really big. That was interesting in itself, finding where that came out of, and then thinking ‘this whole story stitches together somehow’.

“The other reason was whenever you read a book on music from the first half of the 20th century it would treat the music they were talking about in complete isolation. So it would either be just about jazz or songbook writers like Rodgers and Hart, as if nothing else existed. Certainly once it got to rock ’n’ roll that was the end of music as far as some people were concerned. It makes sense for people who listened through that, I suppose, but there had to be a way of threading it together, and I couldn’t really make sense of it, so I thought, ‘That’s got to be my next book’. I knew it was going to take me quite a long time as well,” he chuckles.

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The 600 pages of Let’s Do It are the work of ten years of research, with Stanley, an inveterate collector, wading through piles of biographies, films and compilation albums. “It didn’t feel like I was sat in a library all day long, it was much more enjoyable than that,” he says. “Having to watch all the great Hollywood musicals was not a chore.”

The work of the late discographer Brian Rust proved highly informative on the history of British jazz. He also found a treasure trove of old records on Todmorden market.

The book starts with the arrival of the gramophone in 1900, for which wax cylinders were mass produced. “Everything came together right at the end of the 19th century when Edison discovered recorded sound, but also pianos and sheet music were mass produced. It was the industrialisation of music, which hadn’t existed before,” Stanley says. “The idea that you could have a recording of something and be able to listen to it over and over again, I can’t even begin to think how odd that would’ve been as a brand new experience. That for me was the definition of the beginnings of pop, just the act of being able to play a record five times in a row – that’s entirely relatable now.”

The import of American ragtime and jazz after the First World War changed Britain’s class-based listening habits. “Jazz in particular came along and people like Stravinsky said ‘this is incredible music’, and it’s obviously of black origin so that was something entirely new to Britain,” Stanley says. “It was American music coming over here and then British musicians picking up on that and starting their own dance bands (that changed everything).”

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The industralisation of songwriting began in New York’s Tin Pan Alley where writers turned out songs to order for music publishers – and it continues today in music production teams such as Stargate, who have worked with everyone from Beyonce to Coldplay. “It’s even more prevalent now than it ever has been,” says Stanley. “When the first Lana Del Ray album came out she seemed like this self-invention but I was really surprised when I saw the writing credits on her album. David Sneddon, the Fame Academy winner, had a credit on her first album and I was thinking, ‘How the hell does this happen?’ But modern pop is entirely run like that – people getting a chance to work in Nashville, the Swedish hitmakers...There’s more of them and they’re more scattered, but that goes back more than 100 years, really. I discovered PG Wodehouse was a member of one of the first writing teams – much as I love PG Wodehouse, that was completely new to me.”

One chapter of the book also explores the troubling legacy of American singer Al Jolson, the first visible pop star who notoriously wore blackface on stage and in films. “There was certainly cultural appropriation before that but he was very visible – and he was very visible because he wanted an audience,” says Stanley. “Right the way through his entire life he wouldn’t shut up and he wouldn’t stop talking about himself at any point. But I would say he was the first person who you could have a greatest hits album of songs associated with him because his career spanned decades.

“He carried on using blackface until the 30s which almost nobody else was doing that by then so he really made it stand out and it looks terrible now. He was obsessed with being famous, which was quite unusual for a singer at that time, and obsessed with making songs his own so that people would associate them with him. He used to steal other people’s jokes – he had underlings who would go to theatres and write down the best jokes they heard and then the next day Al Jolson’s lawyers would write to them saying ‘cease and desist, that’s Al Jolson’s joke​​​​​​​’. So he wasn’t a very nice man but in that respect he’s definitely a recognisable early music industry character. He’s definitely an archetype.”

Another chapter is devoted to ‘race’ records, originally marketed at a black audience, which would be re-recorded by white artists. “These companies would see their catalogues completely rinsed by music companies in New York and that was just seen as perfectly fine because Southern working-class people and black people were seen as second-rate. No-one even questioned it; it’s astonishing,” Stanley says. “Virtually all the way through the book I was having to be aware if somebody did something innovative there was probably a story where women or country singers of black musicians were behind it and it would be borrowed and appropriated. I had to read some pretty horrific stuff when I was doing the research on that.”

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He was however pleased to uncover an academic paper that finally revealed the origins of barbershop singing. “Barbershops were one of the very few places (in the US) where black men could congregate and sing together without being harassed, and that’s where it came from, but it took so long to find that out,” he says. “It was very close to publication of the book and I was so pleased to find it.”

Jazz is a key element in the book, with its influence almost all-pervasive the years between the end of the First World War and the advent of rock ’n’ roll. “The most successful Broadway writers were almost all inspired by jazz,” Stanley says. “Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein weren’t but pretty much everybody else was – just in phrasing as much as anything. You could slip between one note and another without singing on the beat which was what everyone did before jazz, it was how you did it, so it seems odd to think of someone like Bing Crosby or Doris Day as being jazz influenced but they absolutely are. It’s a big jump from John Coltrane, obviously, but that’s definitely where their singing style came from. The phrasing is all about jazz.”

Stanley describes Frank Sinatra as the ‘fulcrum’ of his book. “Musically when he makes that run of classic albums in the 50s like Songs For Swingin’ Lovers, that he’s best remembered for, almost all the songs that he was singing were 15 to 20 years old, so he was oddly looking back for his catalogue because a lot of songwriting in the 50s was pretty substandard but creating these things that looked and sounded incredibly modern and futuristic. If you look at the cover of Come Fly With Me that is mid-century in a nutshell. And also he was creating concept albums which looked forward to The Beatles and Moody Blues and beyond, so that’s why I called him the fulcrum: he’s right in the middle of the century and he’s kind of looking backwards to create the future, which I always find interesting in whatever art form when people do that.”

Let’s Do It is published by Faber, priced £25. Bob Stanley appears at Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival on October 22. For details visit https://harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/whats-on/the-birth-of-pop-with-bob-stanley-22-october-2022/. He is also at Louder Than Words festival in Manchester on November 13. https://louderthanwordsfest.com/

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