The Story of Pop

Part One: in print

For its first decade and a half, pop music was a phenomenon not much given to looking over its shoulder. It was of necessity immediate, contemporary, of the moment. To maintain chart success, acts must keep one eye on the present and the other on the future. Nobody gave much thought to what had gone before or to the fact that history was being written around them. Music journalism was all about current developments and future plans – sometimes anticipating events that would never happen.

This left music fans in a quandry – there was no shortage of news and comment about the latest 'chartbound sounds', but unless you’d kept a mountain of back issues of New Musical Express and its ilk, there was nowhere you could look for information about the music of earlier eras. Today, you’ll find a healthy selection of music reference works and biographies in any decent bookseller (and a truckload of worthless AI-generated crap on Amazon), but back in the early 70s, music fans would have searched the shelves in vain. There had been a smattering of biographies, such as Hunter Davies’ The Beatles, The Authorised Biography (1968); and The Shadows had ghost-written their own story way back in 1961. But works like these were the exception, and, critically, no one had yet risen to the monumental chllenge of compiling a complete history of pop music.

That all changed in 1973. In collaboration with Phoebus publishing, the BBC launched an ambitious 26-week radio series, tied in to a weekly partwork of the same title: The Story of Pop. The magazine was impressively produced, featuring copious photographs and incisive articles from leading music journalists. This was to be a history of everything that belonged under the pop/rock banner, the serious and the not-so-serious, by turns informative, analytical and critical. Styling itself ‘The First Encyclopaedia of Pop in 26 Weekly Parts’, the first issue – adorned by an airbrushed cover image of Elvis and Bowie – appeared at the end of September, with the series launching on Radio One that same week, on Saturday afternoon (with a Sunday afternoon repeat). I remember tuning in for some – though by no means all – of this ground breaking series. The magazine, meanwhile, launched with a series of adverts on commercial television, which was highly unusual for an endeavour involving the BBC.

The magazine wasn’t cheap – its cover price of 25p was five times the cost of the Radio Times, and five pence more than the most expensive glossies like Cosmpolitan. But this was a partwork rather than a magazine, and its 38 pages were all content, with no financial support from advertising. As such, it was remarkably good value: by the end of 26 weeks, for an outlay of just £6.50, readers would have in their possession the best and most comprehensive guide to rock and pop music that had yet been committed to print, and for an additional £1.55 you could send away for not one but two heavy duty binders to hold your collection (by comparison, the hardback book version, when it appeared in 1974, comprised only a selection of highlights from the magazines and cost £3.95).

Pop music itself had entered a phase of revivalism in the early 70s, with many acts looking back to the sounds of the 1950s, and it must have seemed like the right moment to step back and consider its origins. The BBC Omnibus strand had had a tentative stab back in 1968 with the overview documentary All My Loving, but nothing on this scale had ever been attempted. As a story, it was well beyond the remit of a single writer, and while the radio episodes were mostly handled by Tim Blackmore and Charlie Gillett, the partwork drew on the cream of British music journalism to ensure all bases were covered.

The magazine was astutely conceived, with the Elvis/Bowie cover clearly designed to appeal to fans of contemporary sounds as much as the rock revivalists. Taking 1956 as its starting point, but eschewing the obvious chronological approach, each issue juxtaposed articles on past acts and current superstars, whilst ongoing features examined the wider aspects of pop culture, and focused on specific genres. A weekly A-Z roundup of artists old and new provided a handy at-a-glance reference guide to who was who in the rock and pop arena, and the first issue was accompanied by a fold-out poster, ‘The Story of Pop Star Trek’ which illustrated, in typically colourful 1970s fashion, the network of influences that had contributed to the enormous diversity in contemporary pop. This was more than just a history – it was bang up to date with analysis and features on the latest acts. Pop fans could hardly have asked for more.

When the radio series came to an end in 1974, the magazine's run was extended for a further fourteen issues, alongside standalone specials devoted to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and 50s Rock & Roll. These publications (which would today be styled ‘bookazines’) brought together the best of the parent mag’s features in each subject area. I had The Beatles edition bought for me in August of 1974, just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in their back catalogue, and my brother had the hardback Story of Pop book bought for him that Christmas. I can’t overstate the importance of this book to me in opening up the history of pop music. Over the coming years, I read up on the bands that interested me, and even those that didn’t – the chapter on Bob Dylan was hugely influential in convincing me to listen to his albums, as were those on The Kinks, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. Its features on 50s artists from before my time shone a light onto a musical era that I might otherwise have ignored.

Despite its 300,000 word remit, the partwork couldn’t find room for absolutely everyone. Those artists judged to have been the most important and influential had whole articles devoted to them (including the likes of Adam Faith and Tom Jones), whilst others were covered in overview articles examining specific genres such as Merseybeat and Acid Rock. All of the big names were there, from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran through Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, The Byrds, all the way to contemporary artists like Marc Bolan, Slade and Sweet.

The book, condensing the magzine’s vast panoply of content (and largely reprinting the pages as they they had originally appeared), was organised into five sections: ‘Rock & Roll’, ‘Black Music’, ‘The Beatles & British Rock’, ‘Dylan & American Rock’ and ‘70s Rock’. It’s interesting to note which of the artists profiled in the magazine were deemed significant enough for inclusion in the hardcover edition. Of the British acts, aside from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, only The Animals, Cream, The Bee Gees, Tom Jones, The Kinks and The Who made the final cut – Tom Jones’ inclusion being particularly intriguing. American rock was represented by Dylan, The Band, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Lovin’ Spoonful and Simon & Garfunkel, whilst the 1950s section featured Bill Haley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly amongst others.

The magazine continued beyond the life of the radio series, with a series of ‘special volumes’ extending the run to 40 issues. Such is the nature of any document that attempts to summarise an ongoing and ephemeral phenomenon – pop music didn't conveniently end in 1974 and still hasn't (although one could convincingly argue for its being dead in the water). For me, though, The Story of Pop book was as much as I needed to know about pop music circa 1974. It was an era when I was taking less of an interest in contemporary pop, and between those covers lay the future of my own personal musical investigations. In the next part of this article, I’ll go on to look at how and where I tuned into the sounds of the 50s and 60s on the radio.

The original run of 26 Story of Pop magazines have been uploaded online as pdfs, and can be found here:

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Radio-One-Pop/Radio-One-Story-of-Pop-26.pdf