Colin Larkin - Encyclopedia Of Popular Music

Copyright 2007 Omnibus Press
This edition 2011 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

ISBN: 978-0-85712-595-8

The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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DEDICATED WITH ETERNAL THANKS TO
LENNON, McCARTNEY, HARRISON, STARKEY & ZIMMERMAN

The appearance of the original 4-volume Encyclopedia Of Popular Music in October 1992 was the largest project ever undertaken for the subject. There were many doubters prior to the publication of what seemed like an over-ambitious project. Maybe they felt the subject did not warrant such a treatment. I know that many people thought I was reckless and I could feel their raised-to-the-ceiling eyes every time I mentioned the project. Every financial institution and bank I tried to raise money from clearly thought I was out of my mind. Their eyes had already glazed over by the time I was shown the door. In the early 90s, trying to raise any money during the worst recession Britain had experienced since the 30s was almost impossible. Trying to raise money for an as yet unpublished multi-volume encyclopedia about rock and pop music was madness; or so they thought. The multi-volume Encyclopedia Of Popular Music is now in its 4th Edition and the most healthy of all its spin-off children is this Concise Edition; now in its 5th Edition. The word Concise was chosen to indicate a smaller, and some say, a more manageable book. I have chosen around 3,000 entries from the 27,000 in the multi-volume. These have been carefully selected by myself and my assistant editor Nic Oliver, to represent exactly what todays purchaser of a single volume music encyclopedia should expect. Since the last Concise Edition in 2002 we have had to let go the likes of Toploader, Martine McCutchen and Papa Roach in favour of slightly more current artists such as Keane, Jet and John Mayer.

Our new publisher Chris Charlesworth of Omnibus Press has graciously given us an extra 150 pages, which not only allows us to put in everything new and significant but it enables us to be less ruthless with what has to be rested. Choosing 3,000 from 27,000 is not an easy task. Over five editions of the Concise EPM I have had to wrestle with this dichotomy. I can most definitely say that this time around I fully justify my reasons for inclusion and exclusion.

The positive reception to the original Encyclopedia Of Popular Music in 1992 was a vindication of my long held, and some say stubborn, belief that popular music was now worthy of serious documentation, and should be taken seriously as a popular art form (although I make no claim that popular music is necessarily serious). Most of my working hours of the past 17 years have been spent listening to music and writing about it. Since selling my company to the New York based MUZE Inc. in 1997, I have been given the freedom to continue to do exactly that. The continuing support, faith and encouragement of MUZE allows me carry on in the knowledge that we really do have the worlds leading music encyclopedia, both in print and on the Internet. They have established a backbone of security and strength for my efforts, and have now taken the MUZE EPM into new areas that I never knew existed. Together with MUZE Europe, we all work in building on this core asset. A further benefit of being USA owned is in managing to shake off the Anglophile tag that one or two tactless American reviewers attempted to wrongly assign to me. This was cruelly ironic because I have always felt myself to be too pro-American in my musical taste.

In 1994 I took the decision to include record labels in the albums section at the end of each entry. We have just about completed this huge task. Finding dates and places of birth of all artists is another uphill struggle, despite our genuine efforts. Unfortunately we do not have the financial resources to visit every public record office to unearth this information. Adding further obstacles, it has been the fashion for at least two decades for artists to use stage names. Record company press offices are no longer given such information by the artists, although it was once a priority. The growth of the Internet and reliable search engines have, however, made this much less of a chore. It is still interesting to note that even the artists themselves are coy about such fundamental details. Some publicists have even requested we massage dates of birth.

Since 1997, having a stable company structure has given me the opportunity to further reduce our outside contributors and rely more on in-house resources. Of the 82 original contributors we now have under 10. We are, however, always looking for new specialist contributors who can write in the style of this encyclopedia. I have received many hundreds of letters since the first edition, and as those correspondents will testify, I personally replied to them all, even though I sometimes took an age to get around to responding. I do derive great pleasure from making corrections to our database. The EPM should constantly change and evolve during the long road to perfection. We continue to welcome (polite) suggestions and gratefully receive notification of factual errors.

The seeds of this work were unconsciously sown in the summer of 1953 when I wandered, for what seemed like hours, around a caravan holiday site at Walton-on-The-Naze, on the east coast of England. I was followed, pied-piper fashion, by up to half a dozen other three-year-old ragamuffins, weaving in and out of overgrown grass paths of endless rows of oval-shaped caravans. I was singing Guy Mitchells She Wears Red Feathers over and over again, not just a few times, but hundreds of times. It was a current hit and unconsciously became the first record that demonstrated to me the incredible power of a pop song. The other children learned the song quickly and joined in using kazoos, plastic harmonicas, whistles, a football rattle, a cricket stump and a tin bucket. They easily picked up on the repeated lyric she wears red fevvas ana hoooly hoooly skirt, and to this day I can still hear it shouted, with that east London/Essex drawl that relaxes the lower jaw. Guy Mitchell was clearly the start of this obsession. I have no idea why I took to him so well, and his music lasted for me until I discovered rock n roll a year or so later. In the life of a small child that is a very long time, and yet I have never forgotten our favourite guy. To this day I am sent a complimentary copy of his lovingly put together fanzine Mitchell Music.

I spent some of my first six years living on a travelling fairground because my parents badly needed some extra money. Weekends and public holidays were spent away from home, living in another mobile home, this time a beautiful polished chrome trailer. At night I slept on the top floor of a converted double-decker bus that was also used as the tyre store. While my parents worked from noon to midnight, I would wander from song to song through a fantastic Technicolor Wurlitzer jukebox of image and sound. All rides had their own turntable and boxes of 78s, together with a heavenly sounding ripped Tannoy speaker system. Each ride from the Dodgems to the Waltzer played its own records, and although the style of music was basically the same, no ride ever seemed to play the same song at the same time. As I roamed alone with nothing but a toffee apple, a loud, distorted Little Richard, Fats Domino or Johnny Otis would slowly give way to a passive Doris Day, who could suddenly become Dinah Washington and the Wheel Of Fortune a few yards later. Imagine turning a radio dial and finding just about every station playing a fantastic song simultaneously! Walking through the stalls and rides was like having a giant radio with no dial to tune. This was all in brilliant colour and added to the smell of fried onions and candy floss. I was unaware at the time just how hip these fairground people were. They were playing the underground music of the time because most of the black American R&B stars were not played on the BBC Light Programme. These imported 78s were fresh in from New York off the large ships that were arriving regularly at the London Docks. The fairground certainly taught me to love and appreciate most American doo-wop, R&B and rock n roll, and when I returned home to the quiet calm of my older brothers bedroom, my musical horizon would be further widened as I would be fed an altogether different diet of his long-playing vinyl; Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker,