Squaring The Circle - the story of two of the most important figures in rock history

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Storm Thorgerson
Picture: Hipgnosis

To men of a certain age – and it is, almost exclusively men – album covers are, or at least were, a big thing. They probably still are, but it’s actually hard to think of the last time you heard of an album cover making headlines in the age of streaming.

There was a time, though, when an album cover was almost as significant as the music contained on the vinyl within. Earlier this year I interviewed journalist Mark Blake about his book Us And Them, which tells the story of arguably the greatest purveyors of album design, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell – collectively the design house Hipgnosis. Their work between 1968 and 1983 produced, most famously, the artwork for Pink Floyd (including their opus The Dark Side Of The Moon), but also more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC. “The Hipgnosis story kind of follows the arc of the LP, and the LP ‘taking over’ from the single as the primary focus of bands,” Mark told me. “[The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a game changer in that sense. So, their career follows the art where the LP was king.”

That career is now the subject of a film by Dutch director and photographer Anton Corbijn, himself responsible for iconic album art of his own, having been most closely associated with Depeche Mode and U2, as well as taking iconic images of everyone from Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. 

Squaring The Circle, Corbijn’s debut as a documentary maker (having previously made dramas like Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and The American with George Clooney), pays homage to trailblazing legacy of Thorgerson and Powell and how they took the concept of cover art - which, for most of the pop era had largely been portraits of the bands - to conceptual pieces of art which complimented or even extended the often progressive, lyrical nature of music they enveloped.

With archive clips of interviews with the late Thorgerson, narration throughout by Powell (who brought the idea for the film to Corbijn) as well as new interviews with the likes of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Sir Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Noel Gallagher and Peter Gabriel, the documentary expands on the studio’s work amid the context of rock counter-culture.

Peter Gabriel’s first three, Hipgnosis-designed albums

“There was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Hipgnosis,” Corbijn told The Guardian recently about the involvement of many of Thorgerson and Powell’s muses. “People just wanted to make [the film] work. They were generous. Everyone was proud of their albums and the work they had done with them.”

“Growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I was obsessed with music and everything connected to it – especially the album covers,” Corbijn says as a pretext to the film, adding that “record sleeves were a huge part of my education. I clearly recall the moment I first saw the sleeve for Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, and the Peter Gabriel sleeves [whose first three solo albums were untitled save for his name and an iconic image]. They just blew me away and this led me on a journey of discovery towards Hipgnosis, who designed these and some of the most memorable sleeves from that time.”

Without doubt, The Dark Side Of The Moon looms large in that pantheon, with Thorgerson and Powell knowing Pink Floyd since their school days together in Cambridge, before moving to London. “Hipgnosis were unique in these early days and they set the bar very high,” says Corbijn.

Thorgerson was very much the ‘ideas’ half of the duo, while Powell, a photographer, had a more instinctive, snappers approach. When combined with the creative freedom they were afforded by bands and their record companies, the gallery of Hipgnosis’ output deserves a chapter of its own in the history of popular music. “They conjured into existence sights that no one had previously thought possible,” says Corbijn. “They produced visuals which popularised music that had previously been considered fringe, and were at the white-hot centre of the maddest, funniest and most creative era in the history of popular music.”

Hipgnosis at work, 6 Denmark Street, London
Picture: Hipgnosis

Album sleeves, he says, during this period became a force in their own right. “In the ’80s, of course, we got CDs, so the album sleeve sort of deteriorated, and the art with it, Corbijn adds, saying that, as a photographer, he was drawn to Hipgnosis’ work by the images they used. He marvels at how they created works of art: “Before we had all the intricate things we can do now on the computer, they did it with a knife and glue, and pieces of paper,” he recently told Collider. “They made really incredible collages and made the impossible possible.”

As the film reveals, Thorgerson and Powell often went to great lengths - and expense - to produce their album art, notably the images for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album and, of course, the ‘flying pig’ cover for that record’s follow-up, Animals. It’s this ambition that inspired the documentary’s title. “‘Squaring the circle’ means doing the impossible, but it also represents the circular record going into a sleeve, Corbijn explained to The Guardian.

“One of the craziest things - it’s also in the film - is a sleeve for 10cc [for the Look Hear? album],” Corbijn recalled to Collider. “They saw the idea of having a sheep on a couch in a beautiful ocean. So they went all the way to Hawaii, not realising [there were] no sheep in Hawaii, and there were no [psychiatrists’s] couches either. So they had a couch made, and they had one sheep, they found one sheep at the university, and they managed to give it a lot of Valium and shot it.”

While Noel Gallagher quips in the film that album covers represents “the poor man’s art collection”, there’s no escaping the fact that Hipgnosis have produced some of the most recognisable images of all time, with The Dark Side Of The Moon’s light-entering-a-prism seared in culture (receiving no more prestigious a nod to the zeitgeist than being parodied in an episode of The Simpsons). “I think both of them have a complicated relationship with  Dark Side,” Mark Blake told me earlier this year. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. I don't think it's a very simple design, and it doesn’t have the narrative quality to it as Wish You Were Here did a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.  So, I think they're both a little bit conflicted about Dark Side, really.”

For his film, however, Anton Corbijn had to negotiate around the frail relationships that exist between the surviving members of the band, most notably the fractious dynamics between founder member Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, who joined in 1967 as co-founder Syd Barrett’s behaviour became ever-more erratic. Barrett himself makes a brief appearance in Squaring The Circle, in a poignant moment when Powell recalls an overweight and almost unrecognisable Barrett visiting Abbey Road studios in 1975 during the recording of Wish You Were Here, by then succumbing increasingly to poor physical and mental health. It is, apparently, a moment that continues to move the band’s remaining members.

Hipgnosis images used for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album

“I guess everybody knows they have four managers these days – for every member there’s a manager,” Corbijn semi-joked to Collider with typically understated Dutch humour. “But I guess the love for Hipgnosis overrode all that, and they wanted to be part of this. I mean, they were not in the studio at the same, but they all said yes to it in the end.”

Pink Floyd, in particular, gave Thorgerson and Powell a platform. Their abstract, obtuse and often ethereal concepts led them to other exponents of early ’70s progressive music, like Wishbone Ash’s Argus, which in turn led to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page inviting Hipgnosis to design the House Of The Holy sleeve (which depicted Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway). That, then, attracted Paul McCartney’s attention, bringing the studio in to realise his concept for Wings’ celebrity-themed Band On The Run cover.

“I hope people see it as a fun documentary, as well as an educational one, regarding that period of music and graphic design,” Corbijn says of Squaring The Circle. However, it also addresses how the Thorgerson/Powell partnership came apart. Having moved to London during the 1967 ‘Summer Of Love’, the duo shared a South Kensington flat, first using university facilities to build their reputation for art (including their debut for Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets in 1968) before opening the Hipgnosis studio at 6 Denmark Street - London’s musical mecca known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’. 

But by 1983 - a year after the launch of the CD - Hipgnosis as, largely Thorgerson and Powell (along with often forgotten Peter Christopherson) - they decided to call it a day. Powell addresses this in the film, breaking down in the process, much to Corbijn’s surprise. “I didn’t see it coming,” Corbijn says of the scene. “It was a beautiful moment in the film. He clearly misses Storm terribly.”

Po and Anton
Picture: Anton Corbijn

As much as Squaring The Circle celebrates an era of album covers that broadly paralleled the rock era itself, it also marks the decline of an art form, first by the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982 (Hipgnosis gave up album design in 1983 and switched to making music videos) and more recently, by the advent of streaming. It’s a point Noel Gallagher makes in the film, highlighting the lack of appreciation for album covers shown by today’s younger consumers, which may be the result of both record companies trimming their artwork budgets, and the thumbnail formats of streaming platforms making the impact of album cover art negligible. “The importance of the record sleeve has diminished,” Corbijn agrees. “In the ‘70s, for young kids there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Yet you had to save up to buy something, so it was meaningful. Now nothing is meaningful because you can get it at the touch of a button.”

Squaring The Circle opens today in UK cinemas and via streaming services. It also be released as a collector’s edition Blu-ray Disc on 7 August.

Arc Of A Diver, my post on Mark Blake’s biography Us And Them can be read here.

Universal exports - David Hepworth's Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There

In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual. 

Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.

Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.

All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.

David Hepworth

What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts. 

The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.

While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background. 

One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.

By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.

Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…). 

The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.

End of the Q

On 8 September, 1986, I started my first proper, grown-up job after secondary school. It required moving from London to the quaint Shropshire town of Ludlow to join the staff of a soon-to-be-launched magazine, LM. Leaving home at 18, just as my school contemporaries were doing the same, but heading off to university instead, I became a staff writer on a publication aiming to tap into the so-called men’s lifestyle market, drawing on the apparent mid-80s young male obsession with music, fashion and culture.

The difference, however, between us and, say Face or i-D magazine - the-then big two - was that they were embedded in Soho, while we were trying to compete from a cattle market town in the middle of nowhere, backed by a publisher best known for computer games magazines for teenage boys. Worse was to come, however. A month after I arrived in Ludlow, EMAP - the stable responsible for the mighty Smash Hits - launched Q, the self-styled ‘Modern guide to music and more’. Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who’d been responsible for turning ‘ver Hits’ and Just Seventeen into two of the best-selling magazines on Planet Earth (I’m not kidding - at one point Smash Hits was shipping more than four million copies a fortnight), Q instantly established itself as the magazine to aspire to.

For a start, it had advertising. Major advertising. The sort of advertising that publishers courted more than any other - lucrative, big-spending brands like Coca-Cola and TDK (this still being the nascent years of the Compact Disc). Secondly, Ellen and Hepworth - by now, stalwarts of British music journalism (they were the 'muso' Whistle Test presenters who anchored Bob Geldof’s sweary bit during Live Aid) - had credibility in the music industry. Not that my magazine didn’t: it had drawn writers from the pages of Melody Maker, She and My Guy, plus this former Boots the Chemist part-time shelf-filler and school magazine writer (i.e. 'inexpensive') and was aiming itself at a 17-plus demographic. We had plenty of music, from the Psychedelic Furs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Level 42 (my first big-name, Top 40 interview, y’all), but steered consciously into non-music topics, such as an entire issue focused on The Big Scary Thing of its day, HIV/AIDS.

Q, on the other hand, had a different brief. For a start, it was an out-and-out music magazine aimed at the older consumer (CD-buying types in - gasp! - their 30s who, yes, may have been into Dire Straits, but because of the CD, were repurchasing their record collections to experience them with pristine digital sound™). For many of Q's readers, it was about reconnecting with the artists of their teenage years. Hence Q’s first issue featuring Paul McCartney on its cover and an interview with Bob Dylan, with Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John and Genesis following on the fronts of the next two issues. We might look back upon this now as the emergence of Dad Rock, but as Hepworth himself pointed out in a recent eulogy in the New Statesman to the child he co-parented, Q was as much a reflection of the growing acceptance that the classic rock era was, in fact OK. Not that Q - which publishes its final edition today - was ever going to be a shrine to the hoary and the old. Over 414 issues and 34 years, it evolved into something more than a platform for wistful nostalgia, pushing into a more eclectic reflection of contemporary music, whatever labels that might draw.

Wrapped up in our own launch over at LM, we were, perhaps, somewhat market-ignorant as to what was going on in the very music press we’d all grown up on. Melody Maker, the NME et al had become, at times, a little outré for their own good, like bolshy students from ultra-middle class backgrounds just trying to be edgy. Q did it differently. If it interviewed Mick Jagger - an achievement in itself - it would do so with both reverence but also the gentle, impish fun Ellen and Hepworth had honed at Smash Hits. The writers they drew on - also EMAP regulars - bought into the philosophy. One of the magazine’s greatest features became the monthly Who The Hell Does XXX Think He/She Is? interview written by the genius that was Tom Hibbert. With each issue he’d meet - and ever-so gently rib - contemporary cultural figures of the '80s and early '90s such as Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox, Jeremy Beadle or Kate Bush (whom, along with Ringo Starr and Boy George wouldn’t take too fondly to Hibbert’s profiling). He even got Ronnie Biggs and Jimmy Savile, the latter clearly before the world knew better.

Ultimately, though, Q readers wanted to read about music. They were musically literate and, unlike the readership of Q’s junior sibling/forebear Smash Hits, looking for more than what colour a pop star’s socks were (though don’t mock it - such ephemera, alongside song lyrics, was absolutely core to the Hits’ phenomenal success). The core Q audience wanted to read about new albums from The Who or Ray Davies as much as hear them wax on about Won’t Get Fooled Again or Waterloo Sunset. They wanted to read about Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but also about Hüsker Dü and the Beastie Boys. Pink Floyd going out on tour again mattered as much to them as some whipper-snappers from Ireland coming along with an album called The Joshua Tree. Yeah, whatever did happen to U2?

Humour was one of the key ingredients Ellen and Hepworth imported from Smash Hits. As someone who has, in recent years, spent an inordinate amount of time in their company at recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcast (itself salvaged from the now-defunct magazine The Word), I know what gentle fun they are responsible for. Pop music and pop culture in general is, to them, a thing of bemusement more than intense Guardian-style navel gazing. Thus, the Hits' comedy tagging that bestowed David Bowie with ‘The Dame’ moniker and McCartney as ‘Mr Fab Macca Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ found its way into Q. Such japery very often served to let the air out of the pomposity that rock music often attaches itself to. In his New Statesman piece, Hepworth recalled the unbridled joy at some of Q’s caption writing: “The picture of Led Zeppelin in full flight with Robert Plant howling into the microphone was headlined ‘The Hoarse Foreman Of The Apocalypse’. Of course it was. The one celebrating the unlikely pairing of Toyah [Wilcox] and Robert Fripp, ‘Mr Chalk Loves Mrs Cheese’. Couldn't be anything else.” Plant, for one, would have liked that. The Fripp/Wilcox view possibly less so.

The reason that Q always did well, though, was that it hired the very best music writers. As an aspiring schoolboy hack in the early 1980s, I looked up to the clique of music journalists whose bylines appeared consistently in the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds. Many found their way into Q, like Danny Kelly (now a colossus of sports radio, but editor of the NME when it ran my first ever live review). Later on, Q added extraordinarily entertaining writers like Andrew Collins and Stewart Maconie. Their appointment coincided with that glorious Britpop period, when it became OK to like guitar music again, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the like strode the world with a British swagger not seen in a generation. It would, though, still take a while before Q stalwarts like Eric Clapton, Sting, Springsteen and The Beatles disappeared from its covers to accommodate the new breed: The Stone Roses appeared on the front of Q46 in July 1990 (before subsequent editions falling back to the Stones, the Floyd and McCartney), with Suede the next cover stars of their time in February 1993. Q, though, has never since tried to be hipper than you, daddio. In latter years it has found space for Lady Gaga, Ed Sheehan and Jake Bugg, as much as maintaining a healthy recurrence of the Wellers and Gallaghers of this world. And while, under more recent editorship, it has sought to become less dependent on the tried and tested, and even delved into murkier waters than Q readers of my vintage might have found comfortable, it has never tried to be pretentious. As a good music magazine should be, it has always presented new acts and old equally as points of genuine editorial interest.

Strangely, though, it hasn’t been changing musical tastes and listening habits that has done for Q: it’s been - like half the economy - COVID-19. “The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that,” wrote Ted Kessler, the magazine’s final editor. German conglomerate Bauer, its latest owner, had evidently tried to sell the title, but in these times of waining interest in print media overall, Q has, from today’s final edition, gone the way of so many others. The long-term decline of print journalism is one thing, but so, too, is the future of music journalism. British music journalism came of age in the 1970s, when the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and others moved the rock era on, embraced punk and New Wave, and then espoused the varieties of pop in the '80s. Sure, it became politicised by the Thatcher era, but then pop became politicised in the Cool Britannia era when Tony Blair hosted Noel G at No.10. Politics was, however, never core to the music press, even when movements like Red Wedge were trying to engage a disaffected youth. The fact remains that the youth today have found other things to obsess over, and it's not quite what direction the 1975 will take with their next album.

Gratuitous plug for a mate of mine who finally made it into Q in 2018

The demise of Q is, then, also a reflection of the demise of music journalism as a must-have in people’s lives. This is where the relevance of a monthly print magazine like Q is questioned. Even though it has, for some time, been readily available as an iPad edition, digital consumption is dropping off. Sadly, the traditions of print journalism - certainly the traditions that inspired me to sit down at a typewriter at the age of 15 - are ebbing away. The attrition is slow, but it is there.

Q, however, appears to have fallen victim to the accountants’ scourge, as publishers continue to find ways to offload venerable, traditional properties that might still have an audience, but not the kind of paying audience they once had (Q sold more than 200,000 copies a month at its peak, it’s circulation in more recent times just above 40,000). "Frankly, [Q] was never really built for the tappety-tappety world of digital," wrote Hepworth in his New Statesman piece. "When somebody put on a record by Aphex Twin, chief proof reader and leading Dylan scholar John Bauldie would look over his glasses and shout, ‘Will somebody get that fax?’ in gleeful emulation of a disapproving adult. That was the magazine’s secret sauce. Nobody was trying to be hipper than thou or younger than they were, and nobody was trying to pretend they liked things that they didn’t." And that was, indeed its charm. It was written for me by people like me. They knew what they liked, but weren’t afraid of reading about something they didn’t know they would like.

It’s here I should mention the reviews section of Q. As entertaining as the features always were, the reviews - actually, the thing that got me interested in music journalism as a career in the first place - were always well considered, evenly scored and mostly respectful. A ’three’, while clearly not a ‘five’, was still not a bad result. But while that remained Q’s constant, over 414 editions, other tides were shifting. The bottom line, then, is that its original brief could never be adapted to changing tastes.

Even after the McCartneys and Claptons had been swapped for the U2s and the Radioheads, and then the latter for increasingly more contemporary names, contemporary sources of information about music had changed, too. The sad aspect of this is that under its last editor, Ted Kessler, Q had moved so far away from its ‘old fart’ origins, that it was providing - for those who were interested - a still indispensable digest of what was on-the-money-sharp in music land. This wasn’t what Q was launched for, but it had evolved over 34 years into something that still represented the very best of music journalism. To quote Joni Mitchell - once as core Q demographic-interest as you could find - “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got ’til it's gone.”

Time travel: The Church live in Santa Cruz

© Simon Poulter 2019

Before Amazon, home delivery was a rare event. In fact, I can only remember one occasion in my youth when the doorbell rang and a van driver was standing outside, having wheeled up to the front door a large cardboard box. I was, at the time, living back at home, having returned there from Shropshire after LM, the magazine I joined after leaving school, had gone bust in May 1987. Although I was managing to eek out some freelance work with Smash Hits and Record Mirror, I was officially unemployed. Signing on. So when this large box arrived, I was baffled. Not blessed with a great deal of money, I was hardly going nuts with what was then termed ‘mail order’. Curious, I opened the box and sifting through the polystyrene packing chips I unearthed a whole pile of vinyl records. Carol, the receptionist (whom, I suspect, secretly fancied me) at LM’s publisher had deemed me the lucky recipient of loads of albums that had continued to come into the magazine’s office from record labels, long after the title had folded. For one reason or another, most of this delivery was from Arista Records, and included disco diva Taylor Dayne's unlistenable debut album and an equally iffy release from Aretha Franklin. Also in the pile, however, was a record that, 31 years later, would have me drive for over six hours from Los Angeles to hear it played live in its entirety.

That album was Starfish by The Church, the Australian band once tipped (or is it cursed?) as “the next U2”, and sometimes compared - not unreasonably - with the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, tropes generated inevitably by a propensity for "ethereal and shimmering"™ guitars drenched in reverb, delays and other effects. Throw in “the 80s” and The Church became part of an Australian invasion (which wasn’t anything like it, but you’ve got to remember this was a time when there were Minogues and various Neighbours on the loose, not to mention Midnight Oil and, if I stretch the antipodean theme a little too far, the Kiwis Crowded House). In customary rock journalism manner, The Church were hard to pin down. Starfish was their fifth album, but not having heard their previous four, it brought me to their sound afresh, and I was particularly drawn to the album's soundscapes, something I'd always liked about progressive rock (I was, then, and still am - suck it up, naysayers - a fan of prog, that genre maligned for the misconception that it's just 20-minute keyboard solos and songs about elves, when in fact Bowie and the latter-stage Beatles were as much prog as anything else). In other words, music that transported you away from the contrite and the conformed, and made you listen a little more, appreciate the instrumentation, wig out even.

Picture: The Church/Facebook

Starfish did just that, and last Friday evening, at the stupendously art deco Rio Theatre in California’s Wigout Central, Santa Cruz, The Church played it in its entirety on the penultimate leg of a US tour to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary (OK, 31st now). I’ll admit, it was a bit of a punt: the logistics of getting from Anaheim (where I’d been at a work event) to Santa Cruz, a 372-mile drive away, notwithstanding, I'd last seen The Church four years ago at the tiny New Morning, an obscure jazz club in Paris, and had been left somewhat underwhelmed. The evening had been let down by lead singer and bass player Steve Kilbey being decidedly worse for wear. Having succumbed to heroin addiction at the end of the 1990s, it was unclear as to whether he’d relapsed or had simply smoked something before the gig to leave him so unsteady and slurred.

Thankfully there was no such indisposition in Santa Cruz as Kilbey and fellow founder member Peter Koppes (co-architect of that signature guitar jangle), along with longtime drummer Tim Powles, second lead guitarist Ian Haug of Powderfinger, and guitarist/keyboard player Jeffrey Cain of Remy Zero launched into Destination, Starfish’s opening track. The long-held convention in rock is that, when playing live, you must avoid peaking too soon. That would be almost unavoidable in playing Starfish sequentially as the album’s second track is the song that really landed them on the map, especially in the US: Under The Milky Way.

Remembering playing the album for the first time that Tuesday morning (quite why I recall it being a Tuesday, escapes me, but by luck or judgement, Starfish was the first out of the Arista pile), it’s hard not to resort to predictable expression when describing Kilbey’s mellifluous vocal and wonderfully understated vibe. No wonder Under The Milky Way remains their signature and, equally, no wonder it ended up in that other totem of the 1980s, Miami Vice. Michael Mann’s music curation on that show had good form when it came to picking songs with atmosphere, be it In The Air Tonight in the opening episode (Sonny Crocket driving his Dino down Collins - get it? - Avenue), or Peter Gabriel’s Rhythm Of The Heat, so Milky Way and, in a another episode of Series 5, Starfish’s Blood Money, fitted the show's aural aesthetic with polished ease. The thing is, though, that Starfish is such a seminal album, and while Milky Way might be a highlight, the sequence does not diminish, even after the commercial peak of its second track. Produced by legendary Los Angeles session guitarist Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi (who'd worked with Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Fleetwood Mac and Don Henley, amongst others)], the album as a whole invited a sparser sound than The Church's previous outings, drawing on the sort of ambience that indeed made The Joshua Tree so evocative of the desert U2 were trying to eulogise.

Three decades on, Starfish in its entirety is still a complete delight to indulge. The album's original production treatment was so transportive, and yet live at the Rio, no less evocative, albeit with an edgier nature, powered by the band's live complement, especially the guitar interplay between Koppes and Haug, and the use of 12-string guitar to give a Byrds-like chime to Antenna. Lost and North, South, East And West bore a epic soundscape, while the album’s second hit single, Reptile, punched epically as, arguably, the stronger of the two cuts to have graced the Top 40.

Picture: The Church

Touring a classic album in its entirety is a risky proposition, though one that has gained considerable heritage vogue in recent years, as bands leverage work that casts the nostalgic fan back to where and when they first heard it. I have no particular desire to return to who I was in 1988 when that box turned up on my doorstep, and despite my relative disappointment the last time I saw The Church live, the proposition of listening to Starship being performed from start to finish, was too strong to resist when I discovered that they'd be playing relatively close to where I’d be in California. This time I resolutely wasn’t disappointed. Actually, my respect for the band was only reinforced, especially after the intermission when they dipped into their near-40-year canon of 26 albums to play a further 12 songs including the Bowieish Another Century from their most recent studio recording Man Woman Life Death Infinity, the REM-like Constant In Opal and the deliciously rocking Sealine, before ending with The Unguarded Moment, which dates back to their 1981 debut, Of Skins And Heart, and Miami, the epic, hazy track of beautiful, shimmering guitar work that closes Further/Deeper, the 2014 album that led me to that somewhat off-key gig in Paris.

You may have come to the end of this post and found yourself still none the wiser about The Church. Albums, from Of Skins and Heart through to their most recent Man Woman Life Death Infinity, may have passed you by; even mention of Under The Milky Way might only register as something you might have heard once. But consider this: legend has it that it was a 1982 Church gig in Sheffield that inspired Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke to form The Smiths. I guess the angle must be in the jangle. In Santa Cruz, a city which proudly retains its hippy vibe (with the surfers and smell of legal weed to go with it), those frugging wildly in front of the stage at the venerable Rio Theatre demonstrated that, with any band of a certain vintage, there’s an audience to be found who will embrace their own histories and the memories that go with them without prejudice. For me, it was a long drive to travel back 31 years but, heck, it was worth it.

Into the Valley

I seem to have made something of a habit of visiting Silicon Valley at the same time as its wealthiest resident makes a splash. Four years ago this week I was in Santa Clara with a group of French journalists on the day Apple staged its "Wish we could say more" 'special event' a couple of miles down the road in Cupertino. It was during this that Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, as well as gifting 500 million iTunes subscribers an unsolicited copy of U2’s brand new album, Songs Of Innocence, which no one, it turned out, really wanted at all.

So to be sitting in an office, last Wednesday, just 15 minutes' drive from Apple's latest launch had a feeling of déjà vu about it. But, then, so often these Apple events do. Even without paying direct attention to the event, occasionally glancing at the video stream on Twitter, I could see it was exactly the usual format: big black screens, Tim Cook opening with the latest numbers of how many gazillion iOS products have been sold, a slick film with design chief Sir Jony Ive intoning his philosophy on the look, shape and feel of things, followed by marketing chief Phil Schiller’s sales pitch.

Picture: Apple

As impressive - and as eye-wateringly expensive - as the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, they are - along with the fourth generation Apple Watch also announced - merely incremental. A new 'Bionic' chip, better OLED displays and a few more wizzy gizmos under the skin might be enough to send frenzied fanboys out to queue in front of their local Apple stores with a deckchair and a flask of tea, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just this year's new model. If, like me, you’re considering replacing an older model, then, also like me, money will be burning a hole in your pocket. But it’s nothing essential, no matter how Apple pitches it. Wall Street takes a similar view. The new iPhones will, no doubt, trouser Apple another huge pile of cash to add to their existing $260 billion stash, but gone are the days when the company can announce something irresistibly must-have, and see its stock price rocket. In fact, Apple shares have a habit of dropping if financial analysts give a "meh" reaction to another slew of nice but relatively uninteresting new toys.

Now I think about it, gone are the days when Silicon Valley produced anything that made the world sit up and take notice. Google Glass, anyone? No, me neither. When I first professionally entered the technology world in 1995 it was still possible to create something totally new. These were the heady days of the dot com boom, where ideas born in bedrooms and garages could attract the largesse of venture capitalists and, consequently, the attention of Porsche salesmen. Silicon Valley had, when I made my first business visit in the late 90s, taken over from Hollywood, 400 miles further south, as the world's dream factory. Just as I’d marvelled at the sight of studios like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Paramount when I first visited Southern California, I was equally as slack-jawed several years later driving through San Francisco Bay Area cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale and seeing the logos of Intel, HP and the-then Internet giant Yahoo! emblazoned on corporate real estate.

Then, tech hardware was the thing. Today the Valley is a sea of code as software, data and algorithms churn through its myriad campuses. Whereas once we bought TVs, HiFis, PCs and cameras separately, today all that functionality. can be crammed into a single iPhone, with its monster screen and (as promoted this week as a virtue), high quality speakers with extra wide output (the sort of thing passengers on the London Underground are just going to love...). Those who glue it all together, store it in the cloud and making the networks that deliver all this data and content more efficiently are the burghers of today’s Silicon Valley. Don’t get me wrong, the behemoths are still there - you can’t miss the household brand names who all, to a company, have an R&D presence in the Bay Area (no cheap affair, either, given that the Valley is one of the most expensive places on the planet in which to employ people). But the novelty that exploded in the 90s has worn off. The Dream Factory has given way to a corporate beige.

In the 26 years since I first set foot in Santa Clara County it has cycled through different phases. Dot com excitement and digital tech gave way to health start-ups, who in turn gave way to the green revolution. The dot coms still exist, of course, nestling in and amongst all the other consumer electronics, health tech, IT and telecoms businesses in the Valley. And there is still some sense of innovation. But not a lot of 'new'. Uber and Tesla might be toddlers by comparison to Google or PayPal, and Facebook famously has evolved so far that it is part of two-sevenths of the world's population. Rather than being the startup it once was, with Mark Zuckerburg and a team of coders hunched over their laptops, Facebook is now part of the establishment, as much Valley founding fathers as Intel and HP. Just three years ago Facebook moved into its 430,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Menlo Park. Now it is planning an even bigger "mixed-use village" on the same site that will include a supermarket, 1,500 apartments, a 125,000 square feet retail space and 1.75 million square feet of office space. Google can claim a similar expansion with its vast corporate town in Mountain View (when I lived in the Valley between 2001 and 2003 I’d not even heard of Google - Yahoo! was, to all intents and purposes, "The Internet".

Picture: Google

What hasn’t changed over the last couple of decades is the wealth. Some Valley veterans claim that it's less ostentatious now than it was in the boom years, while others maintain that it is actually more obvious. It's hard to tell, really. Cars, a touchstone of disposable wealth, appear to a little more German in the Bay Area than other places in America, probably to the annoyance of the current keeper of the White House (who is descended from German imports, anyway). And property...well let’s just say that property in the region is even more ludicrously expensive than when I rented a two-bedroom 'condo' for $2400 a month, part of which was subsidised by my employer.

The can-do culture, however, is still there. The sight of basketball hoops nailed to notice boards and dudes in surf shorts skateboarding along corridors may be a tad worn these days, but the culture prevails, even in those giants who've long-since seen the days of being pioneers on the frontier of technology. Campuses across the South Bay are casual environments, where employees are worked hard but are also allowed some fun in laid-back offices. California's weather provides some of that relief, with many corporate HQs providing outdoor spaces for lunchtime barbecues and team picnics. Many companies, too, have followed Google's cultural lead by offering employees free food and snacks throughout the day, an investment that keeps them engaged - and enclosed - at the same time.

When I first arrived in the Valley I was given a lot of sage advice from more established ex-pats. First, I would soon grow bored of the permanent sunshine (I didn't). The second, was never to wear a suit, lest I be viewed with suspicion and, subsequently, likely to close down a business in times of trouble. I completely forgot this maxim this week when I entered the offices of my new employer wearing the jacket-and-chinos combo uniform in London. Instantly I was marked out by people's gazes as an outsider, given that even senior executives here wear T-shirts and jeans. It's an environment I'm very at home amongst - I've never been much of a suit wearer.

Picture: Google

Workplace attire not withstanding, these last few days have brought me to a conclusion. Well, perhaps more of a realisation. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I lived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It's what makes the Valley tick. In the 15 years since I returned to Europe, I've been immersed in a European corporate culture, working for Dutch, French-American and then Finnish companies. Such companies are often national incumbents, more like civil service organisations than enterprises, nurturing careers from cradle-to-grave. Employees are well rewarded with pensions and holiday allowances, statutory sick leave and other social provisions. And thus they work their way steadily towards retirement, when they cash in their pensions or go off to play a lot of golf. Valley companies, however, run on different view. Even those that have been in business many years still feel like they're on some imaginary frontier, where it is impossible to sit still - dangerous, even - less they leave themselves vulnerable. Life is fast, work is hard, but the work-hard, play-hard spirit is tangible. Even in one of the most expensive regions on the planet to buy or even rent property, people seem engaged and self-purposed. It's an age-old cliche, I know, but here the attitude is 'can do', not 'let's give it some thought'. And I like it.

Desert songs - The Joshua Tree turns 30

30 years ago I'd not yet set foot in America, let alone visited California or the Mojave Desert where a certain type of tree grows in the apparently waterless terrain. But even though it would be another five years before I would feel Western sunshine on my face for the first time, one album had already put me there: U2's The Joshua Tree.

Released 30 years ago today it took the Dublin band over the threshold of superstardom. Hit singles like Pride (In The Name Of Love), Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day, plus the critically acclaimed albums Boy, October and War, had already established their credibility, placing them on the fringes of daytime mainstream without brushing them out of the evening radio shows where the not-yet-huge could consider themselves cool.

Two things happened before The Joshua Tree became U2's turning point: firstly it's predecessor, the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced Under A Blood Red Sky, had netted them hits in Pride and the melancholy The Unforgettable Fire. And then the following year, on 13 July, 1985, the-then still-young band became one of the standout turns at Live Aid. This was due in part to U2 challenging Queen for the liveliest set of all the acts at either Wembley or in Philadelphia. Having torn through Sunday Bloody Sunday and then an extended version of Bad, Bono hammed things up by beckoning British teenager Melanie Hills to join him on stage (a Springsteen-esque gag he'd pulled before), shortly followed by her sister Elaine. At the singer's behest, bouncers attempt to pluck the girls from the crowd, but with Harvey Goldsmith's strict 20-minute limit on each bands' sets ticking away, Bono himself dived into the crowd to assist. A third girl, the 15-year-old Kal Khalique - there principally to see Wham - was also pulled from the throng. She's the one Bono ended up slow-dancing with. It was all gloriously hammy, and not entirely spontaneous ("I don't like the distance between performer and audience. So I'm looking for a symbol of the day, something I can hold onto", Bono would later say) but it carved an eternal mark in the collective memory of Live Aid, not least of which, because it occurred during a set that U2 had scheduled (via clever negotiation) just as the vast US audience was joining Bob Geldof's "global jukebox". It was a masterstroke.

Fast forward, then, to 6 March, 1987. I was in the control room of Studio 5 at Tyne-Tees Television in Newcastle, invited there by the show's producers on the day Jools Holland returned from suspension for saying a naughty word during a live teatime promo. Paula Yates (I think it was) spoke to camera to introduce a world exclusive - the first ever playout of the first single from a new U2 album. The screen faded to black and a quiet but distinct Adam Clayton bassline started to pulse. From the darkened screens in an utterly hushed, pindrop-silent room, Bono emerged, his hair slicked back into a pony tail, wearing a leather waistcoat with a guitar strung across his back. "See the stone set in your eyes," he semi-breathed, "See the thorn twist in your side. I wait...for you.".

We were hearing With Or Without You for the first time. It's a moment I clearly won't ever forget. Like so many bands, I'd not disliked U2 previously but I'd never been all that fervent about them, either. Tonally, too, With Or Without You didn't sound all that different from The Unforgettable Fire, their last single, but there was a notable flavour of Americana (then not really a term) about it. The following Monday The Joshua Tree was released, and it all started to come together.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn's cover photography for U2's fifth studio album set the tone. There, in a black and white strip taking up a third of the cover space were Larry Mullen Jr, Clayton, The Edge and Bono, squeezed into the left-hand half of a frame, with grey desert occupying the other half. There was more of this sparse, monochrome photography on the inner sleeve and back cover, all shot in the vast Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs in California, and all with the band looking less like the punk-inspired New Wave rockers from Dublin that they once were, and more like members of a native American nation. "When I see the people we were back then," The Edge has written in a forthcoming personal photo diary of the Corbijn shoot, "I see a bunch of pilgrims on a journey towards some kind of creative home. I think that really does capture the spirit of the band at that time."

Corbijn's cover art was perfectly in keeping with the music within. Produced by Eno and Lanois (who'd most recently been responsible for Peter Gabriel's breakthrough So), it managed to encompass the signature U2 sound - Edge's instantly recognisable delayed guitar, Clayton's thudding bass, Mullen's crisp drums, and Bono's breathy vocal style - in a simpler, more stripped down sound, one which somehow evoked the desert landscape on the album sleeve. The desert theme became instantly obvious with the opening track, Where The Streets Have No Name, a compelling, scaling song that, according to Eno, had been tortuous to record ("...a ridiculous saga" he tells the latest edition of Mojo, "I estimate that 40 per cent of the time was spent on that one song. It became a kind of weird obsession."

As the album opened up further, it was clear that the Irish quartet were deliberately exploring the badlands of the Americas. Just as Bruce Springsteen had successfully evoked New Jersey and the industrial north-east, The Joshua Tree was doing the same for the barren south-west, with Red Hill Mining Town and even One Tree Hill (a tribute to a U2 roadie who'd died in a motorbike accident the previous year), drawing on the searing heat and dust of the West. Bullet The Blue Sky, while set in South America, sort of followed the album's unspoken theme of America's influence (it had been inspired during U2's involvement in the Amnesty International 'Conspiracy Of Hope' tour of Central and South America).

30 years on, The Joshua Tree is, perhaps, more legend than milestone. But for the 19-year-old me, it opened up a fascination with American music that I hadn't yet fully appreciated. I could recognise references to the blues (later to flourish on The Joshua Tree tour, with their BB King collaboration, When Love Comes To Town) and the various Lanois-influenced clips of Americana that dot the album. What is certain is that it launched U2 into the upper echelons of global achievement, with Time magazine featuring them on a cover with the splash "Rock's Hottest Ticket". Crucially, The Joshua Tree - with its American themes - established them in the country of its inspiration, becoming their first ever No.1 album in the US just three weeks after its release.

Some will argue that Achtung Baby, the Berlin-recorded studio follow-up, was a better album, written deliberately to confound the belief that U2 had, via The Joshua Tree and it's live release Rattle And Hum, become an Irish version of The Eagles. But, perhaps, with Americana as a genre taking more subtle strides to appropriate the American heartland, U2's first commercial colossus can be appraised afresh. A piece by Tim Sommer in The Observer last Sunday made a somewhat valid point that U2's unashamed appropriation of a blend of authentic genres was "the most basic thievery", but no more than a Led Zeppelin had done beforehand. However, Sommer wrote, "the sheer weight of U2’s personality and charismatic energy" allowed them to get away with it. "In their hands, it doesn’t feel like plagiarism, but like a redistribution of deserving and lesser-known art to the masses." Surely, though, isn't this what everyone has always done? From rock and roll to Chicago house music, someone's always taken from someone else and turned it into something different.

This spring and summer we'll get a chance to make our own minds up with U2 retreading The Joshua Tree in a 30th anniversary tour of, first, the US and then Europe, playing the album - as is the vogue - in its entirety. On 2 June the band will issue an anniversary edition of the record itself, including in the obligatory super deluxe package a live recording from the 1987 tour's Madison Square Gardens show, B-sides from the album's singles and new remixes from Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite and others, along with an 84-page hardback book of unseen personal photography shot by The Edge during the Corbijn cover art photo sessions out in the desert.

Obviously it's a package aimed squarely at people like me and my vintage, but as someone who believes that U2 peaked in the contrasting period of The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and began to lose their appeal with the bombast, gimmicks and pontification that followed (not to mention the violation of that free iTunes album...) I will happily take the journey back three decades, get some desert sand on my feet again, and remind myself of what it was like to dream about America long before I got the chance to experience it for real.

Down the tube - the history of rock and pop on TV

It's now just over 61 years since rock and roll - and therefore the beginnings of pop music - made its visual debut. Indeed, rock was still in its infancy when Elvis Presley exploded onto American TV, performing Heartbreak Hotel on CBS's Stage Show in January 1956. Of course, radio had already been established by then, and while video hardly killed the radio star as a result, Presley's hip-swinging, breakthrough appearance set in train a worldwide culture. Television gave a face and a body to the performers who would otherwise only be heard on radio, or pictured in the press or on record covers and, for those lucky enough, made accessible via the stage.

Bill Haley and The Comets predated Presley by performing Rock Around The Clock on The Ed Sullivan Show the previous summer, and some still say that was pop's Big Bang moment. But in the conventional, simplified sequence of musical history, it was Presley's arrival that begat The Beatles, and The Beatles who sparked the rock and pop explosion, which, running the course of the next 40-odd years, brings us to the present day.

One constant through most of this has been the evolution of television. In fact, you could argue that television has had as much of a symbiotic relationship with pop and rock as radio or any other outlet. That certainly is the impression one gets from Rock & Pop On British TV, the tremendous new book by Jeff Evans, which charts the history of music TV in the UK by going right back to the era of stuffy 'light entertainment', when music was anodyne, presenters wore dinner suits and ballgowns, and the teenager was robustly encouraged to be seen but not heard.

Published today - the 60th anniversary of the BBC's seminal Six-Five Special being broadcast for the first time - Rock & Pop On TV delivers a definitive appreciation of how music on British TV grew and has since receded, as well as providing a backdrop to social and cultural changes via shows like Ready Steady Go!, Top Of The Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test, The Tube, The Word, The White Room and, latterly, the lone survivor - Jools Holland's Later....

While talking about the book at a recent Word In Your Ear Podcast recording, Evans raised the notion that anyone, of any musical generation, will have their 'moment' of music television - be it David Bowie's performance of Starman on TOTP (straining then-contemporary views on sexuality with his arm draped around Mick Ronson) or hoary old Dutch prog rockers Focus yodelling Hocus Pocus on Whistle Test, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax being banned by the BBC in January 1984 and then performed on the TOTP Christmas edition of the same year, right up to more recent times, and Seasick Steve's breakthrough, as a novelty item on the 2006 Hootenanny. We shouldn't forget, either, the moments of notoriety: Bob Geldof's expletive-laden rant during Live Aid, the painful live broadcast of The Brits in 1989 when it just didn't go right for Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox, and the ludicrous poking-with-a-stick of The Sex Pistols by Bill Grundy on Thames Television's Today show in 1976.

My own memories of music television are as vivid today as anything in my 49 years - be it Alvin Stardust and his somewhat creepy performances, leather jumpsuit-clad with a ring on top of a leather-gloved hand, or actually being a part of the TOTP studio audience as a teenager in the show's relentless, ra-ra skirted, balloon-fest sixth-form disco 1980s era.

Not surprisingly, Evans himself has his own poignant memories: "I do remember very clearly the moment when the UK was introduced to Meat Loaf, via the video shown on the Old Grey Whistle Test. That was what dominated conversation at school the next day. I should also point out that seeing Wizzard perform See My Baby Jive on Lift Off With Ayshea [ITV show which ran from 1969 to 1974] was the moment when I decided to start buying records. I was blown away by the fullness of the sound and the colour of the performance (Roy Wood in all his Technicolor glory and the rest of this huge band larking about behind). That said, some of my very earliest memories are of TV pop shows, because I had an older brother and sister. I don't remember any detail but I recall seeing programmes such as Thank Your Lucky Stars and Discs A Gogo at a very early age."

Without doubt, one show that spans the generations, still, is Top Of The Pops. Running from New Year's Day 1964 until July 2006, and recording weekly audiences in the tens of millions at its peak, it became a national institution which, says Evans, actually made it difficult to kill off. "It was struggling from the 1980s onwards," he says, "and not least because the music video, which had once seemed like a godsend for Top Of The Pops, because it was so handy for covering the absence of artists in the studio, was now available to every other television show. This meant that TOTP was no longer the only programme to cover the latest hits."

When TOTP began in 1964, from a cold, converted church in Manchester, pop was still an unknown beast. By the time it ended, the Internet had arrived, and pop, to some extent, had been and gone as televisual entertainment. "[TOTP] kept going until it really was no longer viable in the age when anyone could access music via the Internet at the press of a button," says Evans. "This longevity was probably due to the efforts of the various producers who were brought in to gee it up and keep it alive. The show was constantly being refreshed and changing its look so these were perhaps little kisses of life but eventually there was no way back. It might have lasted longer, given more goodwill by the BBC hierarchy and better scheduling, but probably not much longer."

Evans does argue, however, that perhaps we place too much significance on the role of shows like TOTP, despite it's perceived cultural importance, and that has some bearing on the absence, today, of the competition of music shows that existed in the '60s, '70s and '80s. "In truth, music shows have never generated huge audiences. TOTP was the one exception, with its viewing figures of around 20 million in the 1970s. This alone is disincentive enough for commercial channels but it also has a bearing at the BBC. It is not so hamstrung by audience figures but it still needs to get justifiable numbers for its programmes."

The arrival, in 1981, of MTV brought about another shift, though not immediately in the UK. Jeff says that this indirectly encouraged record companies to commission more videos which could then be shown across a broad range of entertainment shows. "Music shows then suffered as a result because they lost their USP. Increasingly, you saw broadcasters commissioning live performance shows as a contrast, or recordings of gigs and festivals, but even these have disappeared now."

Indeed, today television has lost its monopoly. "The general dearth of TV music programmes is also no doubt related to the fact that television is just one medium through which you can get your visual music fix these days," says Evans. The novelty of seeing a band 'in the flesh' has worn off in an era when poor quality smartphone footage of a gig is uploaded to YouTube within a matter of minutes of the house lights coming up. Or, worse, being streamed on Periscope.

"It's not just the easy access and the extent of availability, it's also the immediacy," Evans says. "If Rihanna has a new video out, fans are not going to wait a few days to see it on a regular weekly show. They will watch it straight away. In the same way, if there are still chart followers out there, they want the latest information there and then and not have to wait until later in the week for a run down."

Picture: Maidstone Studios

The one beacon in the dark is Holland's Later..., now in its 25th year and as a result, the second-longest music show on British TV after TOTP. "I think it [has lasted] because it is fairly timeless. Unlike Oh Boy!, Ready Steady Go!, The Tube and TFI Friday that flared brightly then burned themselves out, it has never been tied to one musical fad or era. With its broad cross-section of talent, it protects itself from the changing mood of the music buying public. Similarly, there are no gimmicks, which equally date a show. An intelligent editorial approach is also part of the success."

In mentioning Oh Boy!, Evans also raises memories of some of the more obscure pop shows that have come and gone. Who remembers All Systems Freeman!, a single-series 1968 platform for Alan 'Fluff' Freeman?  Or A Whole Scene Going, Rock Goes To College, Poparound (presented by Gary Crowley), Supersonic, and the legendary Cool For Cats, presented by future ITV wrestling commentator Kent Walton? One of the many joys of Evans' book is appreciating just how, for a good 40 years, music was everywhere on British TV - during kids' TV, Saturday mornings, Saturday evenings, weekday lunchtimes and weekday evenings. And it was spread across the channels, especially - and here's one for the teenagers - when television was exclusively terrestrial and, until 1982, comprised of just BBC1, BBC2, and ITV.

Even then, says Evans, there was an editorial difference between the BBC and ITV. "The BBC was still very Reithian [In the 1950s] in its approach to programming, including music programming," he says. "It wasn't just entertainment, it had to educate and inform at the same time, which was why Six-Five Special was no match for Oh Boy! once Jack Good had gone over to ABC. ABC allowed Jack to do his own thing and just go for pure fun."

As '60s beat pop gave way to more 'serious' music, as The Beatles concentrated on the studio and singles gave way to albums, the BBC tried to progress televised pop music with groovy shows like A Whole Scene Going, How It Is and Colour Me Pop. Says Jeff: "Thereafter, ITV always struggled to put together any sort of challenge to Top Of The Pops and Whistle Test, largely because it had problems networking shows. A lot of the music offerings were either designed for children - Granada shows like Lift Off and Get It Together, and therefore not available to the working adult, or they were made regionally and rarely made it beyond their own region, because they couldn't get into that important peak-hour networked period that was dominated by sitcoms, soaps, game shows and variety."

One significant entry in this canon, and which had a peculiar regional bent, was The Tube. Launched in Channel 4's first week, Malcolm Gerrie and his production team challenged the notion that major bands only appeared on TV shows in London, and successfully provided a breakthrough platform for a whole load of acts between 1982 and 1987 from Studio 5 at Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle.

As a fledgling journalist I was lucky enough to visit The Tube a couple of times - the first to interview Jools Holland on his return from suspension (after dropping the F-bomb in a live teatime promo...), and where I was also in a pindrop-silent control room for the world's first playout of U2’s With Or Without You video, heralding The Joshua Tree and the onset of the band as a global rock phenomenon. Gerrie invited me back six weeks later for the show's finale, after Channel 4 pulled the plug on the show after five series and 121 editions due to declining audiences (although the Holland incident didn't help). It was, nonetheless, a brilliant, brave show, providing a robust challenge to the light entertainment pop of Top Of The Pops, the earnest music journalism of Whistle Test and the emerging pervasiveness of the MTV format.

Today, though, apart from the ghoulish spectacles of the talent shows and somewhat incongruous live performances on The Andrew Marr Show or The One Show, fans of live music on TV must rely on Later...  and the annual Glastonbury visit for their fix. Notably, both are on the BBC, the result of the strong music editorial department run by Mark Cooper.

"I think there have been times when music programmes have been important to broadcasters," reflects Evans. "A good example is during the Beatle-inspired beat boom in the early '60s when pop was suddenly infiltrating all kinds of programmes from documentaries to soaps to kids' shows. Generally, because of the audience numbers, I don't think they have always been so important, however, although - of course - broadcasters have (in the past at least) needed to find a broad mix of programming, so music shows helped with that."

That repeats on BBC Four of vintage Top Of The Pops episodes generate huge - and often ironic - traffic on Twitter is a reflection of the unique shared TV experience of at least a two or three generations. "I'm sure TOTP has been missed," says Evans, "but probably only by some of its former audience, and in a nostalgic sense. I can't imagine today's teenagers, never having seen it except at Christmas, would consider it a huge miss, when they have so many options for accessing music. TOTP also belonged to an era when people watched television together. We had only three or four channels and there was no Internet. That collective experience – shared at a given time every week – has also gone."

A shame, perhaps, but for those who love music, and love seeing music, you could argue that the alternatives - the video streaming services in particular - do still do the job. But as Rock & Pop On British TV consistently reminds, there can never again be a first time for seeing The Beatles, or Bowie strumming his 12-string to Queen Bitch on Whistle Test, or Oasis making its snarling debut on The Word, and such events being the talk of the classroom the next day. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but for this music head, recalling the childhood joys of Sweet or Suzi Quatro or Slade, or finally 'getting' Britpop thanks to TFI Friday and Chris Evans' infectious zeitgeist consumption, there still is a place for an iconic 'appointment' music show on British TV today.