The People’s Songs, by Stuart Maconie – a review

For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues, he’s proved himself a fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful — often all at the same time. In his previous book to this, Hope and Glory, he made a creditable if slightly heart-on-sleeve attempt at British social history. And, as anybody who’s listened to his radio shows will know, few people combine such a serious knowledge and love of pop music with such a refreshing lack of snootiness about it. Not only that, but in the introduction here he tells us that he’s always wanted to write ‘a reliable, authoritative one-volume history of British popular music that would avoid rehashing the received wisdom’.

But then, in the next paragraph, comes the first sign that our high hopes won’t necessarily be fulfilled. ‘For various reasons,’ adds Maconie, ‘the above isn’t quite the book you have in your hand now’ — which turns out to be a piece of understatement in a book that normally favours hyperbole. (Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, for example, are described as disco music’s ‘Shakespeare, Bach and Einstein rolled into one’.)

Meanwhile, those unspecified reasons soon became fairly easy to spot — starting with the format. In the Radio 2 series that the book accompanies, each of the records, and the slice of history they embody, receives an hour’s worth of airtime. Here, they each get a few pages. Now and again, Maconie does achieve the required miracles of concision — on, say, the rise of lad culture in the 1990s (where the song is Oasis’s ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’) or the coming of the package holiday (Sylvia’s ‘Y Viva España’, whose original, rather sentimental lyrics were cunningly translated for the Brits into something a bit saucier).