The story of popular music has long been told through oral histories. The pioneering work here, I guess, was Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro’s 1955 Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made It; the first rock version that I can remember was Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s 1996 Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk. Since then, compiling an oral history—by the men and women who were there—has become the narrative norm for studies of particular music worlds (such as J. P. Bean’s 2014 Singing From the Floor: A History of the British Folk Club), venues (most recently, David Brathchpiece and Kirstin Innes’s 2021 Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches)1 and local scenes (such as Martin Lilleker’s 2005 Beats Working for a Living: The Story of Popular Music in Sheffield 1973-1984).
Gavin Butt’s No...
University of California Press