Shake It Up Baby!: Notes from a British pop music reporter 1961-1972

FROM Phil Spector to Jimi Hendrix, from Little Richard to Marc Bolan, from the Beatles and the Stones to Fleetwood Mac and Captain Beefheart, Norman Jopling interviewed and wrote about hundreds of musical movers and shakers between 1961 and 1972 in British music publications, notably Record Mirror, which he joined as a 17 year old office boy in 1961. After a year of writing filler pieces and chart analysis, in 1962 his first interview proper was with none other than Little Richard.

Later he would write for NME, Cream, Let It Rock and Billboard but it was in Record Mirror that he pioneered in print the UK rhythm & blues boom, was the first music writer to rave about the Rolling Stones (resulting in their first recording contract and management), and his piece on the Beatles, Meet The Beatles, appeared the week 'Love Me Do' was released. For many, it was Jopling's regular columns "Fallen Idols" and "The Great Unknowns" that they first turned to, and which were pasted into the scrapbooks of fans throughout Britain who were starved for knowledge about rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, blues and soul.

In Shake It Up Baby! Jopling tells what it was like to be a teenage pop reporter - profiling not just the big-names but the forgotten as well as the famous. Jopling rubbed shoulders with many of the great behind-the-scenes characters of the era, including Andrew Oldham, Guy Stevens and Peter Meaden - even Phil Spector counselled him for advice. He also reveals the arcane details: the week-in week-out lists of who was interviewed and featured, the stories behind the stories, the passions of the readers, and the day-by-day nuts and bolts of producing a weekly pop newspaper. This is a fascinating read for anybody interested in the machinations of the music press in what was a very different age.

Included in Shake It Up Baby! are many original interviews, articles, reviews, readers' letters, contemporary photographs, and a comprehensive name index.