Nik Cohn

My own review of that particular book from a few years back. The first in a series about Pop Culture books.

My favourite book of all in this respect. Nik Cohn was way ahead of the curve as a commentator on pop music and culture. First published in 1969, this book understands the core appeal of the form. That it's thrilling, immediate and ultimately disposable but at the same time incredibly important. It's also highly prescient, anticipating that something is going wrong, something has been lost from the initial rush and that pretentiousness was in danger of setting in.

Cohn has highly individualised tastes. He's writing before the canon has been established and can be critical of those that are now almost beyond reproach, Buddy Holly for example. He's also not sure that The Beatles were actually a good thing, despite acknowledging their talent. He's much more taken by The Who and The Stones. Oh and he loves P.J. Proby, a figure now almost entirely lost in history's mists. Proby gets a chapter to himself.  Occasionally the prose, very much of its time, grates against modern political correctness, his portrait of Otis Redding for example, borders on racism at points, (again from a modern perspective). 

Still, Cohn can really write. The book was set down in seven weeks in a rented cottage in Connamera, West Ireland in 1968. Ten hours a day at the kitchen table and sometimes halfway through the night too. His writing is immediate as the subject matter it writes of. There's no artifice, his sentences are quite brilliantly constructed to replicate the sheer thrill of what it's talking of, his judgements are absorbing. Altogether compelling reading it's an education, because it gives you a real idea of what it must have been like to experience the sixties, still pop's most important decade, from the inside. From my perspective it's the best there is and not simply because it got there first.