Bestselling music author Bob Stanley ready to do it in Harrogate this weekend

Published by Faber & Faber, the groundbreaking Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop sees Bob Stanley take the approach of his acclaimed bestseller Yeah Yeah Yeah (2013) one giant leap further.

While that epic history traced the evolution of pop from 1952 to 1995, Let's Do It reaches back to the 1900s in its search for the original source of pop’s wellspring.

"When I was writing Yeah Yeah Yeah, I realised I was having to gloss over a lot of important stuff,” says this respected British journalist, author, film producer and long-time member of pop band Saint Etienne who will be speaking at the Crown Hotel in Harrogate this Saturday at 7pm.

"If you think of Elvis’s influences, it was the mixture that made him special. That included almost everything in the 20th century.

"The biggest musicians of the last century – Frank Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles, Bowie – absorbed absolutely everything around them.

"I wanted to write Let’s Do It, essentially, for me to understand all that myself.”

Despite the mountain of information in its 656 pages. Stanley’s personality and sense of humour wriggles free of any academic chains.

Along the way, he not only rescues forgotten stories from the early days of Tin Pan Ally, jazz and the blues, he also rehabilitates acts usually exorcised from everyone’s cool lists.

"If you look for Glenn Miller in histories of jazz, you’ll find almost nothing” says Stanley. “Some jazz buffs don’t consider him to be jazz at all.

"I think it’s because he didn’t do solos. He just wanted to create great songs.

"He was obsessed with getting the sound just right and, by all accounts, was no fun to be around.

"But that’s very modern and his songs have lasted.”

The trend for serious books on rock and pop history has turned into a deluge over the last decade, seeping into hidden corners once thought beyond obscure.

But the down-to-earth but quietly thoughtful Stanley, who is also admired for his series of compilations on Ace Records, including The Tears Of Technology and Cafe Exil - New Adventures In European Music 1972-1980, goes further than most.

This interviewer suggests only Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and Jon Savage’s Teenage: The Creation of Youth: 1875-1945, which were both published, coincidentally, in 2007, deviate as boldly from known history.

"Those were two touchstone books for me,” Stanley replies.

"Both times I didn’t think I was interested in the subject until I read them.

"That’s the measure of a good book.”

A man still working firmly in the pop present, Stanley hooked up with his Saint Etienne colleagues Sarah Cracknell and Pete Wiggs for a new album last year, he is starting to feel the music he loves is receding into time.

"I’m more and more conscious that when I listen to The Monkees and The Beatles, for example, which I did think sounded modern and relevant until recently, it now feels like they’re from the past.”

As for his next book, it’s another under-appreciated part of music history – The Shadows.