Sorted.

The Grout hasn't arrived- I'm a bit worried. The Naughtie has though, and it's not that good. Mercifully he's written it like a history (not a fucking personal history- "I first heard this in 1976, on holiday in Tenby, and it seemed to encapsulate the egg and chips we had at the B&B"). So I'm picking up a few names, and putting them in their right order, and that'll do for now. But he keeps saying stuff like "the secular and the religious came together" every other page.

All You Need Is Love is just getting really good. Fridays More4.

Indeed so. I've watched (and recorded) every episode and it seems to get better and better. Even the episodes that concentrated on territories I know very little about were quite spellbinding (it could be applied to so many eras - that clip of (I forget who, sorry) talking about how black artists had to go MOR to make it in the 50s, followed by a clip of the Platters, could now be of Ice Cube talking about the early 90s followed by a clip of Boyz II Men, and the bit about Scott Joplin resenting Irving Berlin using the word "ragtime" could be about those behind the real acid house records resenting D Mob).

So many frissons: Jack Good explicitly talking about the way rock'n'roll originally appealed to people who could not relate to the post-war idea of the New Jerusalem, the camera zooming into the word "self", surrounding any number of communal hippie concepts, at some late 60s festival (and this was only 1977, remember). Love the obviously critical, Pat Boone-style use of Peter Paul and Mary's take on Dylan (and fucking hell, that Belfast footage).

If such a series was made now, it would probably *start* with rock'n'roll, which was only reached in episode 13 (of 17). They managed to talk to a lot of people involved in pre-rock genres who'd probably have died, or gone gaga, even a decade later - in that respect (and others!) it even bears comparison to The Great War and The World at War. It may seem dated now in that it comes from an era when this sort of prestige and seriousness were seen as *necessary*, and I dare say people like Nick Kent saw it as establishment embalming at the time, bu the damage celebification has done to public rhetoric on pop (and everything) makes it seem, if anything, better than it probably seemed then.

re. Simon Frith, I haven't read his books (I should, of course) but I've recently been reading a lot of late 70s Melody Makers with his contributions (from MM's brief golden era under Richard Williams, before Ray Coleman reasserted himself and pissed off all their decent writers) and he consistently gets to the heart of the era's turmoils and tensions. One particular piece, written in January 1979, stands out - it's an agonised analysis of how Frith fundamentally supported the unions' cause, but felt greater identification in practice with the essential individualism of pop, and concluded that "the unions, as mass culture, have no mythic power at all". More than anything else I've seen in the music press of their teenage years, it seems to have influenced (if only subliminally) the Reynolds/wingco rhetoric that some saw as crypto-Thatcherite.