Let’s Do It: The Birth Of Pop

Bob Stanley Faber £25 ★★★★

In 1901, an advert appeared in The Stage for a library of sheet music which would furnish punters with ‘the latest Pop. Music.’ This, asserts Bob Stanley in his epic and enthralling pre-rock ’n’ roll history, marks the first recorded use of the phrase as shorthand for the most popular sounds of any era.

The book is full of similarly satisfying revelations. One third of arch modernists Saint Etienne, Stanley has a parallel career as a music writer.

A prequel to Yeah Yeah Yeah, his acclaimed 2013 history of pop, Let’s

Do It focuses on the world of commercial music between the late 1800s and

1950s, taking in music hall, Broadway, flappers, Dixieland, hot jazz, ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music, and sundry other pre-Elvis phenomena.

Big hitters such as Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Al Jolson, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and George Formby feature heavily in its 656 pages. Crosby is plucked from his current status as the punchline in a cheesy David Bowie Christmas duet and repositioned as a trailblazing innovator. A master of the microphone, he was ‘the first singer to use technology to shape his sound,’ writes Stanley. It made Crosby pop music’s biggest ever draw, the equivalent of ‘fifteen Beatles’, according to Tony Bennett.

But the real stars are obscure scenestealers such as Mitch Miller, ‘the Willy Wonka of the recording studio’, who produced Vic Damone; Helen Kane, the real-life Betty Boop; and Sam Mayo, the original indie miserabilist.

Stanley’s great achievement lies in rescuing these artists and their music from grainy nostalgia, restoring their innovations and historical popularity to sparkling Technicolor.

He draws lines from then to now, making plausible parallels between Glenn Miller and David Bowie, demonstrating that pop is essentially regenerative, always new yet forever borrowing from the past, continually harking after an imagined golden age.

The big picture stuff, meanwhile, touches on race, gender and global trends which reorientate the locus of pop music from London and Vienna to New York and New Orleans.

Not just an illuminating and entertaining read, Let’s Do It also prompts a spring clean of tired

Spotify playlists, offering myriad new choices to the jaded listener.

A hit, in other words.