Stuart Maconie The People's Songs
After we'd been to see Stuart Maconie at the Ilkley Literature Festival last month, OneMonkey bought me The People's Songs, which wasn't the book he'd been talking about but was nevertheless appealing to the bit of me that is forever fifteen and immersed in the Guinness book indie and new wave. Not only is this a lovely piece of music nerdery it's a social history of Britain since the second world war. In other words right up my street.
Each chapter is named after a popular song. Not necessarily a number one and certainly not all cool (Y Viva Espana anyone?), I hadn't even heard of all of them. However, the idea was that they were representative of something crucial about modern Britain, from immigration to trade unions, youth subcultures to Mrs Thatcher.
Running chronologically from the 40s to 2012 the songs were by no means evenly spread, with at least two from 1984 for instance and only 50 chapters. Within each chapter though the narrative jumps around to whichever years are appropriate. Some chapters are strongly based on the titular song, others use it simply as a jumping off point.
If you like Stuart Maconie's style on the radio you'll enjoy the witty, verbose prose full of interesting but not necessarily relevant asides. I bored OneMonkey to tears with my 'did you know..?' after every couple of pages, and I listened to more Smiths songs the last couple of weeks than I have in ages. I even went to spotify and tried some Ewan Macoll which I'm sure Big Brother will be pleased about.