Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out
Sixties British rock and pop changed music history.  While American popular music dominated the record industry in the late fifties and early sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups soon invaded the world at large and put Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social context of postwar Britain.
Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving into the competition between performers and the recording industry for control over the music. He interviews session musicians who recorded anonymously with the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, and the Kinks, professional musicians who toured with British bands promoting records or providing dance music, songwriters, music directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the best-known performers of the era.
The consequences of World War Two for pop music in the late fifties and early sixties form the backdrop for discussion of recording equipment, musical instruments, and new jet-age transportation, all contributors to the rise of British pop-music alongside the personalities that more famously made entertainment news.  And these famous personalities traverse the pages of Please Please Me as well: performing songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend took center stage while the production teams and session musicians created the art of recording behind the doors of London’s studios.  Drawing his interpretation of the processes at work during this musical revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process.

Opening up important new historical and musical understandings in a repertoire that is at the core of rock music's history, Please Please Me will appeal to all students, scholars, and fans of popular music.

Reviews

"Gordon Thompson's Please Please Me is authoritative, comprehensive, and thoroughly engaging. With lots of information gathered from interviews with the creators themselves and not available elsewhere, Thompson contextualizes his topic with just the right amount of historical and cultural history. Please Please Me will be valuable for all those interested in twentieth-century popular music, music technology, and the British Invasion."
--Walter Everett, University of Michigan
"Where other chroniclers have dug deep into the popular music world of the 1960s, Gordon Thompson has tunneled his way to the center of the earth. His observations coupled with his ability to identify with the artists, musicians, musical directors and producers of that era make for an enlightening, entertaining and educational book. Thompson has caught the camaraderie, excitement, stress, along with the expertise and experimentation that made the '60s a very special time."
--Vic Flick, Session Guitarist
"The stories, the personalities, the attitudes, the secrets, the blunders are all here, exactly as they happened. Not only has the author elevated the history of '60s British Pop to an unprecedented level of excellence, but I have been reminded of just how bloody lucky we were to be part of it."
--Mitch Murray, Songwriter
Oxford University Press, Fall 2008
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26 July, 2008