The People's Songs - Stuart Maconie

'When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake' Plato

'Extraordinary how potent cheap music is' Noel Coward

In The People's Songs, Stuart Maconie argues that what we call pop music has a defiant, unsanctioned concept at its heart: the ability to speak to people, to affect people, to transform their lives. This book tells the story of modern Britain via the records that soundtracked this dramatic and kaleidoscopic period. The story is told chronologically over 50 linked chapters. At the heart of each is one emblematic song that is discussed fully. These are not the greatest songs ever recorded. But the records that tell us something about how we feel and have felt about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, sport, drugs, sex, spirituality, politics, patriotism and more. These are the songs that people listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed tools and danced to - from Telstar to Y Viva Espana, Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs Of Dover to Ghost Town, Wham Rap to A Whiter Shade of Pale, Two Tribes to My Girl Lollipop, God Save the Queen to Blue Monday, Do They Know Its Xmas to Candle In The Wind.