Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City [Paperback]

This book is at heart a passionate, irresistible encouragement to listen more, and to listen better.

After 20 pages, I was convinced that Words and Music was the best book about pop I had ever read.

Words and Music’s many bracing perorations give the intellectual pulses something of a seeing to.

This is a serious achievement on a par with sacred texts Psychotic Reactions and Awopbopaloobop.

It's late at night. Imagine tuning your radio to, let's say, Radio 3, in one of those places with wayward reception There are bursts that reveal the programme to be a vigorously expressed account of the genesis and evolution of pop music 'Cage took the silences in the air around us, and spread them through his music' But then is this the John Cage who 'eventually ended up as a character in 'Ally McBeal' or the musician behind the completely silent 4'33? And talking of 'completely silent' - 'The Sound of Silence' - 'the thing about Simon & Garfunkel is that their songs were 96% heartwarming, with very little of the remaining 4 % anything like mindblowing. More sort of mind sucking'. And then there are bursts of the music itself, it's meanings, its hidden depths, its obvious shallowness. On the surface this book is essentially an explanation and a justification of tracks that might be included on a two-disc discography of seminal moments in pop music history, but Paul Morley is a man obsessed, and he's about to share his obsession with us, the reader, in pursuit of 'the sexily philosophical things crawling through the moist, scratchy undergrowth of rock and roll'.

Paul Morley wrote for the NME from 1977 to 1983 when it was at its most successful and notorious. He wrote for the first few issues of The Face and was a regular contributor to Blitz. He formed ZTT and was instrumental behind the success of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He also formed The Art of Noise . He has writen for many publications. He was one of the first presenters of The Late Show. He now writes for Arena and Esquire and contributes to numerous TV and radio programmes, including the successful Top Ten series on Channel 4. His last book, Nothing, was published to great acclaim by Faber in 2000.