Product Description

For 60 years the way our music has been presented to us has been in the form of the LP, the album: 12-odd tracks representing something much more than the sum of their parts. But if we can download a single track, is the album going to go the way of the old 78 and be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Travis Elborough, who has a deep love for music and albums takes a fond, nostalgic, entertaining and informative tour through the history of the album, from its revolutionary arrival on the global scene in 1948, when it entirely transformed the way music was listened to and produced, to its revered position as the creative benchmark to which all musicians aspire.

Travis has the most astonishing amount of material at his fingertips on career-ending LPs, record-company bankrupting LPs, never-released LPs, difficult third albums, career fillers, contractual copouts, duff tracks, ill-advised solo projects and comeback LPs. He brilliantly places the revered albums of history in their social context, using the album to examine some of the enormous changes in our society, looking at education, work, wages, race and sexuality, leisure and shopping, teenagers and boredom. He also examines the meaning of the current vinyl revival.

This is a book filled with enough detail and idiosyncrasy to satisfy the obsessive but with an entirely unelitist, inclusive insight into how music has shaped our lives and our lives have shaped music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72426 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 468 pages

Daily Telegraph
'Pleasingly compelling... Elborough is a charming, funny and frequently fascinating guide.'

Review
For The Bus We Loved: 'A charming account of the capital's enduring affair with its favourite piece of transport.' (Daily Mail )

'An undiluted delight - witty and whimsical' (Daily Telegraph )

A pocket- sized production as sleek as the vehicle it elegises. (London Review of Books )

For The Long-Player Goodbye (... )

'it reads like a PG Wodehouse guide to pop history’ (Times )

'definitely one for the format-nostalgic' (Telegraph )

Scotland on Sunday
'He's got a happy knack of stuffing sentences with facts, colour and incident, then loading social comment onto the musical info as if it was strawberry jam... Best of all, he sends you back to the albums.'

Customer Reviews

surface barely scratched
This book purports to be a history of the vinyl LP, its rise, decline and (slight) return, but it is really just another potted history of mainstream popular music from the '60s to the present day. It's a shame, because it starts out so well - the first third of the book tells the story of the development of the vinyl long-player in fascinating and apparently well-researched detail. If the author had kept this up throughout, the book would have been great. Unfortunately, by chapter 6 he seems to have run out of anything to say about the format itself, and reverts instead to a plodding and over-familiar exposition of popular music from the Beatles through psychedelia, prog, punk, post-punk, so on. I'm guessing that the target audience for this book is made up of Mojo-reading anoraks who will know this stuff back to front anyway, so really, what is the point? And the author has a wearying tendency to fall back into glib cliche (for example, "...after the murder of a fan at Altamont in 1969, [the Rolling Stones] retreated into a cocoon of coke and morphine"....Of course! That was what got them started). The story isn't helped by a surprising number of mis-spellings and minor, but annoying, inaccuracies.

Overall, this is a missed opportunity, a good idea poorly executed. So many potentially interesting facets of vinyl culture are not covered at all (as a previous reviewer notes, developments in audio engineering are not even touched on), or mentioned only in passing (the gatefold sleeve, cover art, quadrophonic sound, mysterious pressing plant inscriptions on the runout groove, etc). The eventual decline of the format is given about 2 pages, the recent surge in interest / sales a few sentences. There is a whole book about this fascinating subject still waiting to be written.

I Just Loved This
One of those subjects that just seems to consist of curious little facts, petty rivalries, greed, beauty and art. The Long Player Goodbye is a sterling attempt to squash the history of the long player record into a relatively concise and certainly entertaining romp about a subject that touches so many. Perfect bath time reading.

Amusing sashay through the madness of the music world
This often laugh-out loud, pin-sharp account of the various interlocking stories behind the vinyl LP's success is rather wonderful. Elborough has clearly aimed to make a details-driven book for a non-music-nerd audience and the book achieves this balance rather well. The author seems to be something of an emerging specialist on social history with an eyebrow raised (the author's other book was a similarly broad review of the history and demise of the Routemaster bus - a long time feature of London's streets) and a similar approach is used here. The chapters on the insane amounts of smooth and easy listening that shifted in the 50s and 60s are a particular highlight, particularly resonant as one considers the maddening success of the likes of James Blunt... Hmmm... And as one might have expected given its now-stricken state, most of the music industry's success with the LP seems to be a series of domino-style accidents, a point the author captures nicely. A top read.