BOOK OF THE DAY: TONY CLAYTON-LEAreviews In the City – a Celebration of London Musicby Paul Du Noyer Virgin Books 326pp, £18.99
EACH AND every city thrums to its own rhythms, yet surely London can lay claim to having some of the most singular and commercially popular of the age.
For many, the choice of the best pop song that best references the city might well be a toss-up between The Kinks's Waterloo Sunset, Squeeze's Up the Junction, Noël Coward's London Prideor Lionel Bart's Who Will Buy . . . ?(from his soundtrack to Oliver!).
As music writer Paul Du Noyer notes though in this fascinating exploration of the city’s musical heritage, there is far more to London’s landmarks than rock and pop. Ambitiously, Du Noyer begins his journey in 1133, the year an Augustinian friar (and former minstrel) called Brother Rahere was allowed by King Henry I to stage a three-day fair in aid of the priory and hospital Rahere had established in Smithfield.
Amid the traders and thieves, harlots and urchins, Rahere had, undoubtedly unwittingly, devised the earliest recorded live music/entertainment show, a motley collection of acts that foreshadowed the variety bills of music hall.
From this point on, Du Noyer joins the dots from Shakespeare (in 1603, the Bard's contemporary, the poet/dramatist Thomas Dekker, published a ballad titled Golden Slumbers, the nursery rhyme-like quality of which was adapted by Paul McCartney in 1969 and set to music for The Beatles' Abbey Road) and John Gay's The Beggar's Operato The Who, David Bowie, Madness and Lily Allen.
Ye t In the Cityis no overtly scholarly or labyrinthine exercise in social history along the lines of Peter Ackroyd's London the Biographyor Peter Bushell's London's Secret History, neither is it an academic analysis of a musical schism (cf Jon Savage's England Dreamingor Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces).
Rather, Du Noyer – a former editor of Qand Mojoand presently a contributing editor of The Word– sets out his stall in disciplined, cogent and unpretentious prose while simultaneously never losing sight of the timeline.
He also unearths many nuggets of detail and information: the Queen of the Music Halls, Marie Lloyd (her dictum? A little bit of what you fancy does you good), ran off with an Irish jockey almost 20 years her junior; a wonderful quote from Arthur Sullivan (half of the operetta duo of Gilbert and Sullivan), who, on hearing that Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph, commented that he was “astonished at the wonderful power you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record for ever.”
If only he had known . . .
Du Noyer's crowning achievement with In the City, however, is to tie all the strands together ever so neatly without affecting a smug resolution.
It’s a celebration of the city’s music through the centuries, for sure, but it’s more than just that.
The manner in which he links everything from public execution songs and the advent of music hall ("the default setting of English pop") to the shock of jazz ("timid and tortuous and self-conscious and indirect", GK Chesterton is quoted as describing it), the dawn of rock'n'roll, the excitement of punk and the current mosaic of styles that embrace everything from bhangra to Lily Allen ("a post-punk Marie Lloyd", according to Time Out)is equal parts smooth, eloquent and persuasive.
"Loneliness seems part and parcel of London life," Du Noyer concludes, "but every song is an act of reaching out." Perhaps every book – or a good few of them, anyway – achieves the same thing. In the Citymost certainly does.
Tony Clayton-Lea is freelance journalist and author who writes on pop/rock culture for The Irish Times. His favourite London song is My Old Manby Ian Dury and the Blockheads.