Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The book that declared pop music dead

Nik Cohn thought John Lennon ‘self-pitying’, Led Zeppelin ‘embarrassing’ and rated Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ above Van Morrison’s entire career. Bob Stanley revisits his 1969 book

In the spring of 1968, the former Queen magazine pop columnist Nik Cohn rented a cottage in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland. All of 22, he had fallen out of love with pop music, and he hid himself away for two months to write a cross between a memoir and a farewell letter. For Cohn, it felt like the end of an era of pop that was “intelligent and simple both”, that carried its implications lightly, that was “fast, funny, sexy, obsessive, a bit epic”. He sniffed pretension in the air as pop turned to rock, and he wanted to get it all down on paper before he completely lost interest. The confidently titled Pop from the Beginning moved from Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in 1955 to the ebbing tide of psychedelia and the return to roots (Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna”) of early 1968. Published in 1969, just as the Beatles disintegrated, Pop from the Beginning was the first definitive text on pop music. Cohn wrote in fast, short sentences; the book read like a series of 7in singles, with no room for deviation, no long solos, no flab at all.

Related: Bill Haley: Rock Around the Clock – the world's first rock anthem