if there's a better compiler than Bob Stanley out there, I'd sure like to know...

talking of wire/tony harrington compiled comps, the wire 3cd box on Mute i think is really good, but have never seen reviewed or talked about. Check the tracklist:
http://www.discogs.com/release/125213

Anyway bored that downloading will actually be a pain for little (or big) records companies that will decide so that to issue comps, and the problems about it (licensing), it's no long useful and profitable (even if of unavailable music).

The Garbarek-Coltrane-23 Skidoo-Melle stretch on Jazz Satellites is one of my favorite sequences.

big list of comps here:
http://www.saintetiennedisco.com/compile.html

that there website is a great source, thanks to whoever is doing it!...hopefully, it will be updated over time...(off the top of my head, I can think of two omissions: The Bobbie Gentry Capitol Years comp and the liner notes for the Jasmine Minks Soul Station Creation comp...I think Stanley/Wiggs also did a Dusty Springfield comp)...

yeah, it's actually far from complete. anyone got something better?

psyched 2 read

http://thequietus.com/articles/13523-bob-stanley-yeah-yeah-yeah-interview

Yeah, mine arrives tomorrow.

I was just reading someone’s account of going to a birthday party as a kid and one of the parents brought over ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud and said, ‘You’ve got to play this, nobody has a party without playing the current Number 1!’

Oh, I was actually that kid!

Tiger Feet was the Gangnam Style of 1974 I guess.

and then the Cat crept in.

Got this for my birthday!

Happy birthday!

Yeah, yeah. (yeah)

only skimmed it so far (it seems like a book that warrants skimming really), but yeah yeah yeah, his history of pop seems interesting, though it seems to have zero interest in recent pop, and its all a bit too much of a flash through pop, never really getting deep into it. inevitable i know, but, it felt like a very post-internet way of writing about music history (should probably sit down with it a bit longer first, its just that after all the amazingly positive reviews, i think i expected something a bit better. the faber book jon savage and hanif kureishi did seems a slightly better approach to what stanley is trying to do, if more skewed towards rock, stanley is more open minded, and more equal in his appreciation of diff genres).

ok, so you have skimmed it, and it seems not to have much depth, right?

Advice: start at page one and read it properly and don't skip chunks, then you should find it more rewarding.

For all that books that attempt to encapsulate the history of pop either tell me little I didn't know, or end up opaque to the point of being impossible to read, this book manages to be entertaining and informative.

The guy's got a problem with Neil Young, that's for sure.

i'm just getting into it -- obviously a very british perspective happening here. seems to be hitting its stride in the mid 60s.

i'm about halfway through and enjoying it. he wears his enthusiasms on his sleeve and he's most useful when describing things he really likes. he's funniest when describing things he doesn't. his chapters are skillful encapsulations and like mark g says it acquires depth as the stories accumulate.

note the u.s. edition is trimmed down by more than 100 pages but gains exclamation points in its title. i'm reading the u.k. version.

He's quite pro-Neil Young isn't he (y'know, having covered Only Love Can Break Your Heart and all that)? Patti Smith and Joe Strummer and David Crosby come in for quite a bit of stick if I remember correctly.

Best thing about the book are the little anecdotes he drops in about various artists, plus the chapters where he covers scenes I don't know much about. Any book with such scope is only going to scratch the surface but it's an excellent overview and he does a good job at joining the lines between scenes - like how disco developed for example. And there are always more obscure records in there as well as the obvious stuff.

There's very little attention given to much post-Crazy In Love but you have to draw the line somewhere, even if I don't really agree with his drawing of the end of the Modern Pop era (I'm not sure I agree much with the concept in the first place).

Oh great, you made me go and get the book. Alright then: "Neil Young [...] had a definitive line in self-pity [...]: 'I went down to the radio interview, found myself at the microphone.' Poor lamb."

The stuff I knew about felt largely like potted music history, which made me suspicious of the rest. He seems to make the same point over and over--when rock and pop parted ways, it was bad. I guess the Abba chapter was good, but again, is any of that new?

Shifting gears back to the particular subject of the thread, his Croydon Municipal label he started last year has been consistently good fun. Emphasis on public domain pop and jazz from the fifties and sixties, various compilations with an emphasis on female singers. He's got a related blog site for it:

http://croydonmunicipal.blogspot.com/

But there's no official site for the label itself as far as I can tell. It's a Cherry Red sublabel and pretty easy to find through their site and other spots.

x-post

Christgau weighs in. I think there's also talk of the book on the ilm good books about music thread.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/anti-rockisms-hall-of-fame/

Discussing Bob Stanley's book. From July 2014

It took me hours just to get through the first chapter of this because I kept having to stop and cross-reference things on YouTube / Wikipedia. Really enjoyable though. I saw him do a talk last year (interviewed by old-ILX's own JtN) and he seemed incredibly charming and humble, and didn't seem too annoyed when the first question from the audience was about what he thought about jazz music.

this book is awesome for making spotify playlists. the one i pulled from the pre-beatles english rock and roll chapter is great.

If you search Spotify for Bob Stanley playlists, you'll find the crowdsourced playlists for Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

Much I love Bob Stanley and his work, I found the book tough going. His style too condensed and telegraphic to comfortably read at length. There's no-one more qualified to summarize the last forty years of Phil Spector's career in a single sentence (and btw he's great at this kind of thing) or the solo careers of the Beatles in a paragraph, but it's just too exhausting to go through page after page of such condensed history.

I read it on the bus for about a month. It works very well in 20-30 minute intervals.

Yes, every chapter is like an article in Mojo or whatever. Also it's too personal in terms of what he thinks is important. He is a true music nerd's music nerd and he's a master on historical details, influences, product minutiae, anecdotes, industry movers and shakers, who-did-it-first type claims etc. But to him every single scene is centered around the music. Fashion, economics, class and so on are given short shrift. So it's clear he sees a difference between "skeletal" and "spindly" guitar sounds but for fashion it's not more like "trousers got wider". eg. he sees no significance whatsoever in Dexys' coming out in Brooks Brothers suits (he's amazed it WAS a huge deal at the time), but vast significance in their lyrics. Or he quotes Joe Strummer "like trousers like brain" without attempting to put it in context or explain it.

Not that I think he really understands the Clash anyway - another complaint I have is that his likes and dislikes (particularly his quick disposal of so many US bands) are petty and personal and detract from the overall theme of the book which I think is supposed to be a comprehensive overview of how the history of popular music is currently dissected, pigeonholed and defined. Ultimately I think it tells us a lot of details about stuff that Bob appreciates (which, don't get me wrong, is very broad) but there's not really an overall point to it.

FInally got around to reading this, seems pretty fantastic so far. Read through the 80s chapters then went back to start from the beginning. Been buried in it for the past 48 hours, avoiding the Christmas relatives. Wonderful to read through alongside the Spotify playlists -- don't think I've been so engrossed in a music book since Revolution in the Head. There's lots of information here, but it never reads info-dumpy. And even when he gets it wrong (only a third of a page on Madness, dissing Langer & Winstanley), he writes without arrogance or Maconie-esque mateyness.

I got this book for Christmas. Stoked.

Finishing "Yeah Yeah Yeah". It reminded me of Nick Cohn more than anything else - this sort of conversational style, with a pinch of "hey others like it tho so I might be wrong!", more like talking to a friend than an attempt at canon building. This is the kind of music criticism I find easiest to take, these days, though it has its limitations.

So is Bob Stanley still doing his compiler work? I would've thought CD compilations (always one of my fav mediums) would've been totally slaughtered by streaming now, but Ace records for example still seems to be chugging along...

So is Bob Stanley still doing his compiler work?
Yep, his label Croydon Municipal is churning compilations out on a regular basis; the quality is consistently high.

http://croydonmunicipal.com

hmm, that website hasn't been updated for over a year (RIP websites) but there have been 2016 releases

When I read Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Pop Music, I made a Spotify playlist of every song mentioned, if anyone wants to give it a go. It took me two years to listen to it as my go-to “I don’t know what to listen to” walk the dog playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3seDeDLhycytZX5WxUNvkl?si=k0mtofByTIqka1fxtTvWBw&pi=Y9gDsx0HTaWhB

Nice, thanks! Once upon a time I started a Spotify playlist called Stanley Sez, and was meant to include all of the more obscure/unexpected songs that he's championed over the years, in liner notes, reviews, blog entries, etc. A daunting list, as you can imagine! I bailed not too long after I started, but one day...

Scrolling to the bottom of the 3145 song playlist to see what Spotify suggests was left out. Waterloo Sunset, lol.

lool!

I mentioned, some years ago, the song "Drink this up, it'll help you sleep" from the first F&TD album, to Bob. I couldn't bring myself to listen to it, seeing as how that's the creepiest song title I've ever seen.

This looks fun!

https://www.acerecords.co.uk/weds-morning-6am-radio-hits-from-the-small-hours-1970-1983

This is a good idea, I have many lasting memories of the kitchen radio being on as my brothers and I ate Captain Crunch and were shuffled off to school. Tracks like "Breakdown" by Alan Parson Project and "Blinded By The Light" (Manfred Mann's version) are permanently etched into my brain in that context.

Ooh 99 Miles From LA - Art Garfunkel

"Motorway City - The Golden Age Of Car Travel 1966-82" will be released: 31.07.26. Available to preorder now.

MOTORWAY CITY is a superb, driving-based collection of library music. The tracks on this album were all written between the mid-60s and the early 80s to hymn car travel, back when the petrol-operated motor car was seen as the transport mode of the future, when motorways were new and thrilling. It was car travel’s golden age.

The tracks are highly collectable rarities from the libraries of De Wolfe, Chappell and Hudson. It has been compiled by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne who has also written the informative sleevenotes. It stretches from mod movers to proto-ambient, something for every car journey.

Library music soundtracked the many short films that extolled the virtues of TopTray restaurant at Watford Gap or the comfortable leather seats in an Alpine Sunbeam. These tunes illuminated the joys of motor travel, and were given titles such as ‘Fast Lane’, ‘Super City’ and ‘Clearway’.

Many of these tracks seem time specific. The sun peeks over the horizon for Basil Kirchin’s ‘Through New Territory’; Reg Tilsley’s ‘Hold The Road’ is so bright at midday that you’ll need to wear shades to stop the sun getting in your eyes; John Fiddy’s ‘City Skyline’ has to be seen (and heard) at dusk.

Ex-Soft Machine Karl Jenkins provides the tense ‘Wheeling’, and Peter Reno’s thunderous ‘Convoy’ shifts the mood up a gear. Maybe you should risk nudging the speed up, 80-plus, to the soundtrack of Alan Hawkshaw’s ‘Fuel Injection’ or Simon Park’s mellow-but-dynamic ‘Big Road’.

Beautifully packaged in a gatefold sleeve, MOTORWAY CITY could be the soundtrack to your summer holiday.

https://www.acerecords.co.uk/motorway-city-the-golden-age-of-car-travel-1966-82