Joy division

It was Sir Hubert Parry who in 1899 complained about ‘an enemy at the doors of [real] music… namely the common popular songs of the day’, ten years before he put a William Blake poem to music and came up with the most famous classical/pop fusion of all time, ‘Jerusalem’, which even featured on a mid-1970s number-one album by ELP. I did assume that a book subtitled How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop would reference such synergies. It does not. Elizabeth Alker’s is instead a competently written, entertaining if scattershot history of avant-garde electronic music, but presented as if some musical chasm separates John Cage from Sonic Youth. In fact

To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation that came of age in the late 20th century he was a guide to the future. We have him to thank for ushering in the strangest, most revelatory pop music to the cultural mainstream. Wilson was among the first to spot the significance of catalytic bands such as the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Happy Mondays and to champion them through his countless media projects. Factory, the scrappy record label he co-founded in 1978, produced some of the biggest-selling records of the 1980s, with a spirit of ‘subversion through inefficiency’.