SUNDAY, 11 AUGUST 2024

When I was studying at Warwick University in the late 1970s/early 80s, I lived in a hippie-trippie household in Coventry in the days when hippies were becoming something of a joke. We were all into music that was still marginally trendy even if punk was gobbing on our incense sticks: I was a big fan of Beefheart, Brett was into Syd Barrett’s solo work, while Jon, who looked very much the stereotypical hippie, naturally went for Jefferson Airplane.

A couple occupied the room above mine: Di and Charlie (no, not that Di and Charlie, although everyone’s favourite royal misfits did get hitched towards the end of my time there. My friends organised a not-the-royal-wedding picnic by a river － in Ludlow if I remember correctly － and we all had lots of fun tossing a Di and Charlie frisbee around).

The Di and Charlie chez moi were strange in a completely different way from the royal couple. Neither of them were students any longer, having dropped out of Warwick, although she was learning Serbo-Croat in her spare time for some reason I can’t remember or never discovered, while Charlie worked in catering at the university when he wasn’t drunk. Anyway, the strangest thing by far about Di was that her favourite band was the Seekers. Yes, that group from Australia who did stuff like I’ll Never Find Another You. I couldn’t help but admire Di for this: preferring a cheesy, folksy Australian band when she was surrounded by a peer group still cocooned in 60s weirdness and flower power.

But in retrospect Di had a point. When I hear the Seekers now, I realise how good they were in their way, even if a lot of their stuff was twee. First, Judith Durham had an amazing voice. Next, their harmonies were up there with the Hollies or the ultimate harmonisers, the Beach Boys. And forget the cheesy, folksy stuff. Did anything encapsulate Swinging London like the whistling in Georgy Girl? Does anything else set off visions of bouffants and mini-skirts and Carnaby Street in quite the same way?

But my personal favourite among their songs is The Carnival Is Over. I know, I can hear the groans. Yes, it’s sentimental and obvious and predictable, but every time I hear it, it still tugs on my heartstrings and my eyes get tearful. If ever a song proved Coward right when he wrote in Private Lives, ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’, it’s this one.

Except it isn’t cheap in many ways. That’s what makes Pop into Pop – the direct arrow to the heart. And Pop often fails when it tries to go beyond this. Personally I really like Days of Pearly Spencer and The Windmills of your Mind, but neither were smash hits, even with all the publicity Radio Caroline gave to the former. They weren’t big hits because they didn’t go directly to the heart: they detoured through the brain. They’ve both been covered since, of course, and got some of the acclaim which I feel they deserve, but neither offers the instant gratification of classic Pop.

What got me thinking about all this was a YouTube I watched by Samuel Andreyev. He is a composer and musician whose channel I first found because of an analysis he did of Frownland by Captain Beefheart and then his interviews with members of the Magic Band, but he is classically trained and ranges across many different musical genres (and I’d highly recommend his channel to anyone interested in music).

Anyway, this particular post was titled 20 Songs You Need to Hear. And I wondered which twenty songs I would have included, but then I realised it would just be a list of my favourite twenty songs. Then I thought about Andreyev’s list and his felt much the same. It seemed to have no organising principle with regard to genre and arguably didn’t have much pop music at all, for many of the chosen pieces (by Soft Machine, Beefheart, the Velvets, Leonard Cohen etc) weren’t really Pop.

Now it’s his channel and he can do what the hell he wants with it, of course, and I won’t argue with many of his choices because lots of the musicians he chose are my favourites, too. And I especially admired him for choosing Cohen and then selecting Everybody Knows. I say that because Andreyev is a musician and I get the feeling that he inhabits an aural world in a way that I, as a writer, inhabit a verbal world. Yet he could appreciate a musician whose greatest gift is as a lyricist (he also recognised this quality in Cole Porter). And the song he chose was perfect as an example of everything that is great about Cohen as a lyricist – his mix of irony, cynicism, a barely submerged idealism, and more than a splash of Romance with a capital R. (Since writing the paragraph above, I have found out that Andreyev has also published several books of poetry, which I guess debunks a lot of what I say here.)

Anyway, as always I digress. This got me thinking about Pop as a genre and I felt none of Andreyev’s selections were pure examples of the form. Yes, some of them had made the charts, but they were all slightly off-centre compared to an imagined archetypal pop song. If I were choosing twenty great pop songs I would definitely have included something by Spector and perhaps another girl band such as the Chiffons, The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore, different Beach Boys from the one Andreyev chose (God Only Knows, perhaps, or Wouldn’t It Be Nice), a Burt Bacharach number or two, (Walk On By by Dionne Warwick and The Look of Love by Dusty), and perhaps some soul (Sam Cooke? Wilson Pickett?) or even Motown.

So why do I feel that these songs are in some way the purest expression of Pop? Well, Pop, as I said, is direct. It was originally made to be played on the radio, so it had to grab your attention and it had to do it quickly. In general it couldn’t afford too much subtlety. It especially needed an opening that smacked you between the eyes, such as that of Reach Out, I’ll Be There. The Stones in particular were very good at this (I’m not a big fan of the song as a whole, but the opening to Gimme Shelter is stunning). Pop also tends to be emotional. Love and its trials and tribulations is by far the most common emotion, of course, and the feelings expressed tend to be personal. When Pop gets political, it generally fails. Rock and punk, with their harder edge, are much better suited to it.

Another essential of Pop is that it is manufactured, created in a studio by professionals aiming to make the perfect three-minute product. Whereas jazz is usually far better live, a lot of Pop loses its magic in performance, which is why I suppose there was so much lip-synching on Top of the Pops. Unlike a lot of modern jazz, Pop tends to be short, again a result of its history of needing airtime on radio. When it gets to stuff like Hey Jude, which in my personal opinion wastes a good song by tagging on a long ending that sounds more like a football chant, it has lost its way. For me, Ticket to Ride and Paperback Writer are vastly superior.

Because at heart Pop is commercial – it exists in order to make money. In Pop, though, this often becomes a virtue – it prevents the kind of self-indulgence that happened in the late 60s/70s when the simplicity of Fats Domino or Little Richard had become the tedium and faux-profundity of rock operas. Pop is honest in this regard. There is none of the pretence that often exists in other art-forms, especially the world of art, that this is art for art’s sake rather than for filthy shekels. Many of the musicians who created the wonderful Pop of the 60s, of course, almost certainly did it purely for the joy they found in creating it, but not the moneymen who mattered (although I have to concede that things were much less corporate in those days and there were lots of entrepreneurs at that time who did put their money where their mouth was, especially in black music).

For all its lack of pretension, though, Pop can be strangely promiscuous and will borrow from anywhere: the various love songs that rely heavily on The Moonlight Sonata, for instance, or the moments of jazziness at the end of  Dead End Street, or Malcolm McClaren raiding opera, or the baroque excesses of Bohemian Rhapsody or Wuthering Heights. But, and this for me is important, every time it does this, it risks moving away from the essentials of its genre and getting lost, even if that particular borrowing is successful, and eventually needs to be dragged back to a singer, a lead guitar, a bass, a set of drums, and probably a piano, all in a recording studio.

Before I finish, let me quickly say that I understand that I am creating arbitrary categories when I suggest this clear divide between Pop, Rock, Soul, and so on, especially in the artistic fervour that was popular music in the 1960s. Andreyev has a Kinks song in his list, for example, but where would one place them? They were clearly Pop in the sense that they had a string of singles that were big hits, but they also went off in their own idiosyncratic direction as the decade wore on. And how about bands like the Stones? Are they Pop or Rock? Clearly these categories are fictions on one level. I can only say in my defence that I have been trying to isolate what I see as pure Pop, even if I know this Platonic form doesn’t exist in reality and every song to some extent is a mix of genres.

I’d also like to make clear that I’m not claiming that Pop is mindless froth and is incapable of dealing with ‘serious’ issues. Popular music has always spoken for the poor and the oppressed, for example in forms such as folk and reggae. However, modern commercial Pop takes place in a more compromised situation because of its focus on making a profit. Not even this, though, prevents social or political comment, even in songs which many people would claim are mindless froth: for example, the girl in the Shirelles song wondering if he will still love her tomorrow (the subtext being after sex has happened), or one of the Moonlight Sonata songs, Past, Present and Future by the Shangri-las, with its hints of sexual pressure, abuse or even rape (‘but don’t try to touch me, don’t try to touch me, cos that will never happen again’).

I have no idea what happened to Di and Charlie from my hippie house, not even whether either or both of them are still alive. But if Di is, I really hope that from time to time she gets out her black vinyl version of her Seekers Greatest Hits album, puts it on her turntable, and whistles along to Georgy Girl. Because another thing that Pop is very good at is capturing the spirit of an age and reminding us all of how daily life used to be.