SMIP - Sublime Moments In Pop

By Jonathan Westwood

The very best pop music is undeniably irresistible: its whole point is to captivate the listener immediately and burrow its way firmly into their subconscious. 

But sometimes it’s one of a record’s slightest and most fleeting of things - a chord change, a vocal ad lib, a guitar lick, a bass line - that makes your pulse race a little bit harder—that moment that makes you go, ‘Hmm...’ 

In SMIP: Sublime Moments In Pop, Jonathan Westwood selects 10 such moments—from artists such as The Beatles and Blondie, Bruce Springsteen and Roy Orbison, Sam & Dave and Billy Bragg—and explains how and why they’ve drilled their way into his own psyche.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pithead Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781533748355

Book preview

Contents

INTRODUCTION

SMIP #1

SMIP #2

SMIP #3

SMIP #4

SMIP #5

SMIP #6

SMIP #7A

SMIP #7B

SMIP #9

SMIP #10

For Charlie and Lorcan

[1]

INTRODUCTION

YOU HAVE NEVER MET a cooler seven-year-old than me.

I don’t care what my family, former schoolmates or teachers might have to say on the subject: I was Joe Fucking-Cool at the age of 7½.

And I say this with confidence because, at that most tender of ages, I bought a Sex Pistols single on its first release and helped it reach number three in the charts.

How’d you like them apples?

—-

Now, I am prepared to make a couple of very small concessions regarding the lowness of my childhood temperature.

OK, yes, the Sex Pistols had effectively split up about 18 months before the single in question was released in the summer of 1979.

And, yes, the singer of the single (who wasn’t the Pistols’ real singer and, in fact, wasn’t even an original member of the band) had fatally overdosed six months before it saw the light of day.

And, all right, Sid Vicious’ interpretation of C’Mon Everybody was an epically pisspoor cover version of a 1958 Eddie Cochran song, about which even Malcolm McLaren must have had some reservations about inflicting on the public.

So if we’re being absolutely didactic about matters, I guess I didn’t technically buy a punk single during the glory days of punk.

But punk came late, and in a diluted form, to the pit towns of the East Midlands, OK? When it came, I was there. That’s what matters.

And I had great taste, because Eddie Cochran’s original version of C’Mon Everybody is still the mutt’s nuts.

Anyway, let’s not detract from the real issue here.

I was 7½-years-old.

They were The bloody Sex Pistols.

Mum: what were you thinking...?

—-

My point—amazingly I do have one, of sorts—is that I was a precocious little brat where pop music was concerned. I started early and, 35 years on, I’m still not through with it, even if I no longer pore over the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles or listen to the charts.

In fact, my obsession started well before my punk phase.

I remember being so enthralled by the movie Grease in 1978 that I emotionally blackmailed my poor, dear Mum into taking me to see it at the local ABC cinema three times. Culpability for my behaviour is excusable because of the utter and indisputable loveliness of Saint Olivia Newton-John.

(Though have you actually listened to the lyrics of Greased Lightnin’? Have you considered the movie’s plot? Teenage sex, unwanted pregnancy, delinquency, mooning. Again, I think it’s reasonable to at least question my Mum’s judgment in matters of child rearing...)

Nobody sentient over Christmas 1977 could have avoided—or failed to come to loathe with a vengeance—Wings’ execrable Mull Of Kintyre and its bloody bagpipes. Apart, apparently, from the two million-plus Britons who inexplicably handed over good money for that particular seven-inch piece of vinyl. To paraphrase the Daily Mail: if you all love the Mull of bloody Kintyre so much, why don’t you go and live there?

In fact, while I don’t actually remember this incident, it would seem I was already immersed in pop music as a five-year-old, when I apparently bounded off a Chesterfield Corporation bus one August morning in 1977 to break the news to my waiting grandmother that it was, a bad job about Elvis.

Which it was.

A very bad job indeed.

Seems I’ve always called it as I’ve seen it.

—-

Pop music matters to me and I’ve always thought that, while much of it is meant to be consumed and almost instantly disposed, some of it has always stood apart as works of art that deserved to be taken more seriously than The Establishment—yes, Brian Sewell et al, I’m looking (disdainfully) at you—would have it.

But in fairness, this book is not about pop music as art. This is about those parts of pop music that make you want to bounce around your bedroom wearing nothing but your underwear as you sing along at the top of your lungs.

When I talk about pop music in this book I’m simply referring in general to popular contemporary music. I’m not interested in defining genres further than that. A particular single may be ‘pop’, it may be soul, rock, R&B, metal, rock’n’roll, whatever: it just