I was a teenager in the 60s and early 70s, and pop and rock are a closed book to me.  Rather like Bach preludes and fugues.

My sister bought all the classic Beatles' EPs when they came out (She loves you, etc) but I suspect that was peer pressure from her weenybopper contemporaries.  I remained disdainful and stayed with Gilbert and Sullivan.  (She was 8, I was 10?)  When the classic Beatles' LPs (Sergeant Pepper etc) came out in my later teens, my English master at school enthused, but my sister never expressed any interest and never bought them.  Which leads me to expect the earlier enthusiasm was peer lead.

Call me a snob.  I prefer to say I was a very lonely loner.  I was not looking for anyone's approval or admiration in my determined fogeyism.

Your mention of the Sergeant Pepper album brings to mind the enthusiasm for it shown by my very brainy younger cousin. Open scholarship to Balliol and all that. He never was very musical though


I was never lonely. My friends thought as I did. That could be because of the age difference, DB. I do vaguely remember that there were girls at school who were keen on Elvis or Pat Boone or (thinks) Frankie Laine, but I thought them ignorant

I remember the self-confidence of some grass roots areas of the labour movement, up until about 1977, shown for example at Lucas Aerospace where workers proposed an alternate corporate plan - switching production from arms to kidney machines. The proposal was met with fury by senior management and the workers’ own trade unions.

Hilary Wainwright and David Elliot in 'The Lucas plan: a new trade unionism in the making?' (Allison & Busby) set out, against the background of the plan, precisely what Thatcher was called in to stop: a direct challenge by the workers themselves to traditional management prerogatives. Similar things were happening at Vickers and elsewhere. It had to stopped. British capitalism was stuffed if it wasn't. The union leaderships had to regain control of their membership, and the British workforce made safe again for capitalism. So I agree with Jeremy Black. The tragedy was that the political right saw the danger clearly, and organised against it, while the left argued and split and allowed itself to be outmaneuvered.


They were anarchists, not disciplined Leninist/Stalinist trade unionists, so were shot through with nihilism: a childish/romantic refusal to yield to any authority. They were, effectively, an anti-democratic force because democracy requires co-operation, particularly when you lose a vote and must knuckle down to pursue a policy you opposed.

Kimd of agree but I think bands like X ray specs almost thought they had a duty to  get in the singles charts and on to TOTP There was a disdain for the pop of the era but the early punks held up 60s soul and the early stones and who as the pinnacle of pop music.

Someone examining the 'immanent' aspects of it? I've never quite understood why 'immanent' seems to be allowed a clean bill of health when 'the music itself' always gets such a severe drubbing.

Probably because it's assumed that behind a phrase like "the music itself" lurks a satanic miasma of prejudice about the grand and privileged status of the artwork (especially when there's a score involved which can be mistaken for "the work itself"), while "immanent aspects" sound more like something "cut down to size" and more manageable or even dismissable.

I wonder whether the divisions, and mutual exclusiveness, within the pop world really count as 'snobbery'. There doesn't appear to be the affected or hypocritical admiration of something that snobbery seems to imply. The admiration is genuine and unaffected enough. Isn't it more (thinking back to the young Garnett in the sixties and early seventies here) a form of musical tribalism, my team is better than yours - that sort of thing? (Or is that <gulp> itself a snobbish thought.)