A delightful Radio 4 documentary that manages, without fuss or pretension or the male posturing that writing about music became, to show us a world (in the middle 60s) that we probably now underestimate or have forgotten about – a time before musicians became precious about their art and before people writing about it felt the need to become personalities themselves. And yet these supposedly fluffy interviews were read by millions and contained perhaps surprisingly truthful insights, based on significant access. It was very largely a time before ‘the PR person’. The title is slightly misleading: replace ‘rock’ with ‘pop’, which actually adds another layer to it – a time when what became rock was genuinely mainstream and ‘popular’ at the same time, a time before the myriad sub-genres to come. Well done to all who made the programme.
The Women Who Wrote Rock
Thanks for this Colin. Downloading now.
Sounds interesting Colin.
Good comment about rock and pop too.
In the 60s no rock musicians had any problem with being a pop star.
“Your friends are making a pop star or two every weekend”
(Donovan’s Young Girl Blues)
Then pop became a dirty word and everyone wanted to be a rock star.
Indeed – we gained something, we lost something.
Sometimes you look at/listen to artists of today and it doesn’t seem to be at all about making people happy through music. It seems to be something else – confrontation, branding, aggression, looking misrerable… People role-playing, basically.
It’s nice to go back to a time when it was people turning the pages of an unwritten book for the first time. The last 50 years of the 20th Century (to give it its broadest extent – you could narrow that down to perhaps 1963-85) was a unique set of circumstances for popular music.
We all enjoy the ‘teenage wasteland’ era of the 70s, because its so rich in both mythology and documentation and great artistic careers that can be pored over and anthologised till the cows come home – and even lots of the media personalities who became known entirely on the back of this music have now become writers of autobiographies and figures of (self-)myth – but we shouldn’t forget the pioneering, less po-faced era before it.
I might extend that to 1988 or ’89. I was in my late teens during the Acid House era and it really did seem like uncharted waters. Not really my cuppa, musically, but exciting.
Yes, caught some of it live; very good.
“Making people happy through music.” That’s an admirable goal.
Not always appropriate: we need songs that face the more serious issues too.
But there have been many, Bragg and Leven spring to mind, who could manage both.
Less po! More pogo!!
If I may bring to attention (others may and me perhaps previously mentioned?) the recent Sandy Denny biog ‘I’ve Always Kept A Unicon ‘. At last, sympathetic and fair to all.
Ah, but Rob, we were talking about women music writers (not writers of music) in the middle 60s era of ‘Fabulous’, ‘Rave’ et al, plus the likes of Maureen Cleave on the Daily Mirror.
Maureen Cleave? What a brilliant name. It evokes both dangerous psychopath and generous bosom.
They’re repeating that doc on Saturday afternoon, while on Radio 3 (?!), at the same time, there’s a doc on ‘Bitches Brew’.
Re: ‘Rock’.
Unless followed by ”n’ Roll’, ‘Rock’ is the word, much loved by Americans, that I have spent the best past of my waking hours desperately, and almost entirely successfully, trying to avoid.
As soon as the messenger became more important than the message (1971?), I scarpered.