Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock

"That’s a good one to start with. As far as I can remember it was the first rock book I ever read. I bought it in 1970 when I was thirteen. And I think it is the most influential of all rock books, in that he invented a style with which to write about rock music. I was very keen from the age of about 11 to about 17 on rock papers like the New Musical Express , Melody Maker , Sounds and Disc . I’d get all four every week. The best writers were really on New Musical Express and you could see the influence of Nik Cohn on them. It wasn’t English as it had been taught at school, but it managed to convey the excitement of rock. “I think a lot of ghostwritten books are rather underrated because it’s just another version of oral history” Nik Cohn was very keen on rock as excitement, rather than rock as a version of classical music, or whatever progressive rock then tried to turn it into. It was all about thrills, excitement, and the book still reads really well, I think. He’s also very prescient. I was just looking at it today, knowing we were going to talk, and there’s a bit on Phil Spector. He’s really good at describing the sound of Phil Spector’s records, but there’s a paragraph where he says, “Otherwise, though, he wasn’t so much in any Dada/beat/hippie tradition, as pop bowdlerisation of Oscar Wilde , meaning that he was sharp and bitchy, fastidious, vulnerable and a culture snob, that he had great style and that you always felt he was doomed. He even looked rather like Oscar Wilde. He had exactly that kind of ostentation.” I thought it was quite clever of him to realise in 1970 that Spector was doomed. He’s very good at describing the sound and also getting to the heart of what made people tick. He talks very interestingly about Pete Townsend’s anger. No. He has different chapters on different people, P J Proby , who’s completely forgotten; Eddie Cochran and others. He’s got one on Dylan and one on the Stones. He has one on The Beatles. He doesn’t particularly like them, but he’s fascinated by the way that, in four years, they can go from these very self-confident people to collapse—the book came out in the year they broke up. He says: The thing that fascinates me most in all this is that it’s happened so fast, that it’s taken only five years for ultimate hard-headedness to change into ultimate inanity, and I’m puzzled. There are, of course, lots of easy explanations. Too much acid, too many ego trips, too much money and success and wastable time—and maybe the easiest answers are the right ones after all, but I’m not so sure. I sense that there’s something here that I don’t yet understand, that’s going to become clear only in retrospect. He’s sort of anti-intellectual in his approach. He likes excitement. One of the odd things about The Beatles is that they hardly wrote a single song that you can dance to, which is peculiar. I think that would have turned him off them. Nik Cohn is an intriguing figure. He became known for something which is very unlike him, which is that he wrote a piece of journalism, in I think the New Yorker , about disco in the 1970s, which was then bought and turned into the film Saturday Night Fever . Presumably that got him lots of money. But as a character, he’s so unlike Saturday Night Fever . I’ve never seen the point of Led Zeppelin, either. He hated pretentiousness. I think writers like Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill or Charles Shaar Murray, the best music journalists, would have acknowledged his influence. They all wrote in this new non-Sunday-best kind of way."