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A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives
_________
‘Hepworth’s knowledge and understanding of rock history is prodigious … [a] hugely entertaining study of the LP’s golden age’ The Times
_________
The era of the LP began in 1967, with ‘Sgt Pepper’; The Beatles didn’t just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made An Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album.
The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.
It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became ‘artists’ and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives.
This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.
‘Hepworth’s knowledge and understanding of rock history is prodigious … [a] hugely entertaining study of the LP’s golden age’ The Times
_________
The era of the LP began in 1967, with ‘Sgt Pepper’; The Beatles didn’t just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made An Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album.
The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.
It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became ‘artists’ and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives.
This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
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344 people want to read
About the author
David Hepworth
11 books216 followersDavid Hepworth is a music journalist, writer, and publishing industry analyst who has launched several successful British magazines, including Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, among many others. He presented the definitive BBC rock music program Whistle Test and anchored the BBC's coverage of Live Aid in 1985. He has won the Editor of the Year and Writer of the Year awards from the Professional Publishers Association and the Mark Boxer Award from the British Society of Magazine Editors. He is the radio columnist for the Saturday Guardian and a regular media correspondent for the newspaper.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
August 11, 2024
I once spent several years of my life trying to track down a deleted LP by the 1970s progressive rock band Van Der Graaf Generator. I can still remember my sheer joy when I finally located the album in a second-hand record shop in Liverpool. It turned out to be one of the group’s less impressive offerings but this in no way diminished my sense of satisfaction at finally having found the wretched thing. I now owned it and that’s all that mattered (must be the hunter-gatherer in me).
I mention this as it’s pertinent to something touched on in David Hepworth’s history of the rise and fall of the 12 inch LP: the pleasure of not being able to hear a record because it had been deleted, or was perhaps just unavailable in your local store, and having to doggedly seek it out. The chase being almost as pleasurable, possibly more so, as actual possession. This is, of course, now an unknown pleasure in a world where pretty much all music ever recorded is permanently available at our very fingertips.
As told by Hepworth the glory years of the vinyl LP ran from 1967 to 1982. As this happens to coincide with the heyday of what is now known as ‘classic rock’ this book is as much a celebration of that genre as the LP itself. He also looks at the way changes in technology changed the sound and nature of the music that was made and how it was consumed.
A Fabulous Creation is part memoir and there are lots of autobiographical reminiscences of Hepworth’s life as a vinyl junky. Pure nostalgia, of course, but he recreates with wit and a certain poignancy an age in which the physical LP was at the centre of millions of young people’s lives. He recalls hanging around in record shops for hours at a time as an impoverished student just to be close to records, gaze at the often astonishing artwork on the sleeves, marvel at the names of bands unknown to him and imagine what sort of music they could possibly make, and hold the records in his hand. It reminded me that listening to music used to be as much a visual and tactile pleasure as an aural one.
This is an amiable evocation of an era when record buying was a hugely lucrative mass market rather than a niche one with an uncertain future. It wasn’t that long ago but in many ways it reads like an account of a lost civilisation. It was a time when many of us music obsessives said, with our latest album held proudly under our arm, ‘it’s only the music that matters’. When we arrived in the digital age and only the music remained, in an infinite virtual library of recorded music beyond the wildest dreams of even the most avaricious 1970s teenage audiophile, we made the shocking discovery that the music certainly wasn’t all that had mattered to us after all.
I mention this as it’s pertinent to something touched on in David Hepworth’s history of the rise and fall of the 12 inch LP: the pleasure of not being able to hear a record because it had been deleted, or was perhaps just unavailable in your local store, and having to doggedly seek it out. The chase being almost as pleasurable, possibly more so, as actual possession. This is, of course, now an unknown pleasure in a world where pretty much all music ever recorded is permanently available at our very fingertips.
As told by Hepworth the glory years of the vinyl LP ran from 1967 to 1982. As this happens to coincide with the heyday of what is now known as ‘classic rock’ this book is as much a celebration of that genre as the LP itself. He also looks at the way changes in technology changed the sound and nature of the music that was made and how it was consumed.
A Fabulous Creation is part memoir and there are lots of autobiographical reminiscences of Hepworth’s life as a vinyl junky. Pure nostalgia, of course, but he recreates with wit and a certain poignancy an age in which the physical LP was at the centre of millions of young people’s lives. He recalls hanging around in record shops for hours at a time as an impoverished student just to be close to records, gaze at the often astonishing artwork on the sleeves, marvel at the names of bands unknown to him and imagine what sort of music they could possibly make, and hold the records in his hand. It reminded me that listening to music used to be as much a visual and tactile pleasure as an aural one.
This is an amiable evocation of an era when record buying was a hugely lucrative mass market rather than a niche one with an uncertain future. It wasn’t that long ago but in many ways it reads like an account of a lost civilisation. It was a time when many of us music obsessives said, with our latest album held proudly under our arm, ‘it’s only the music that matters’. When we arrived in the digital age and only the music remained, in an infinite virtual library of recorded music beyond the wildest dreams of even the most avaricious 1970s teenage audiophile, we made the shocking discovery that the music certainly wasn’t all that had mattered to us after all.
January 19, 2025
3.5 stars
"Bands tried to avoid recognizing the dirty secret of the music business, which is that most groups have only got enough good ideas for two or three albums, but enter into financial arrangements obliging them to provide many, many more." -- some cynicism from the chapter '1978,' on page 175
Although I'm an ardent admirer of rock writer Hepworth's previous works - including the excellent Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year Rock Exploded and also Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, 1955-1994 - I suppose I felt a sort of fatigue with his newer offering A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saves Our Lives. This time he focuses on how the 33 1/3 rpm album - a.k.a. the long-player or 'LP,' which came into existence in 1948 - became the vessel which introduced a hell of the lot of now-legendary rock / pop / R&B / soul music into our lives. Starting in the summer of 1967 - with the Beatles' revolutionary Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - and concluding with Michael Jackson's multi-platinum Thriller in late 1982, Hepworth gives a series of year-by-year essays on a number of acts, their albums, and changes (such as the move away from albums towards cassettes) in the music business over that fifteen-year period. One chapter of note later in the narrative was about the introduction of the Sony Walkman - originally to be called either the Soundaround or the Stowaway - which interestingly caused a ripple effect which later included mix tapes, Napster, the iPod, and music becoming a more personalized listening experience via this 'portable stereo.'
"Bands tried to avoid recognizing the dirty secret of the music business, which is that most groups have only got enough good ideas for two or three albums, but enter into financial arrangements obliging them to provide many, many more." -- some cynicism from the chapter '1978,' on page 175
Although I'm an ardent admirer of rock writer Hepworth's previous works - including the excellent Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year Rock Exploded and also Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, 1955-1994 - I suppose I felt a sort of fatigue with his newer offering A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saves Our Lives. This time he focuses on how the 33 1/3 rpm album - a.k.a. the long-player or 'LP,' which came into existence in 1948 - became the vessel which introduced a hell of the lot of now-legendary rock / pop / R&B / soul music into our lives. Starting in the summer of 1967 - with the Beatles' revolutionary Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - and concluding with Michael Jackson's multi-platinum Thriller in late 1982, Hepworth gives a series of year-by-year essays on a number of acts, their albums, and changes (such as the move away from albums towards cassettes) in the music business over that fifteen-year period. One chapter of note later in the narrative was about the introduction of the Sony Walkman - originally to be called either the Soundaround or the Stowaway - which interestingly caused a ripple effect which later included mix tapes, Napster, the iPod, and music becoming a more personalized listening experience via this 'portable stereo.'
April 7, 2019
Over the past couple of years, David Hepworth has been cementing his already considerable reputation as a pop music writer and commentator with books that leave you feeling simultaneously inadequate yet brilliantly cleverer for having been in the close proximity of his world. This latest book is as much a social history of how our consumption of music has changed thanks to technology and innovation (sometimes outside the music business) as it is about the glory of the 12” LP.
Hepworth is a superb and genial narrator. This book is packed with anecdotes that you can use down the pub to look awfully clever; rammed to the rafters with more facts than you could shake a shaky tone arm at and curated by someone who you know is approaching their subject with as much love as scholarly application.
Hepworth is unapologetic in what he regards as good and bad and, for the most part, you find yourself agreeing with his choices. Part of the reason for this is, unlike many music critics, he is neither cruel nor petty and recognises the unalloyed joy that music brings. At the end of the day, he is a fan.
The book covers the glory years of the LP from 1967 and The Beatles Sgt Pepper through to Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1982. Hepworth is especially strong on the 1970s as you might expect from someone living through that decade as a maturing adult and his discerning observations of what was happening around this amazing surfeit of music is wittily and pithily observed.
One can have arguments with the albums contained here: and, one suspects, the author would only be too pleased to know such arguments are taking place- and he’s also short on recognising that post 1982 there have continued to be some wonderful examples of LP genius but this is the whole point of this book. It’s a point of view; an argument and, for this reader, I was only disappointed when the book finished. Joyous.
Hepworth is a superb and genial narrator. This book is packed with anecdotes that you can use down the pub to look awfully clever; rammed to the rafters with more facts than you could shake a shaky tone arm at and curated by someone who you know is approaching their subject with as much love as scholarly application.
Hepworth is unapologetic in what he regards as good and bad and, for the most part, you find yourself agreeing with his choices. Part of the reason for this is, unlike many music critics, he is neither cruel nor petty and recognises the unalloyed joy that music brings. At the end of the day, he is a fan.
The book covers the glory years of the LP from 1967 and The Beatles Sgt Pepper through to Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1982. Hepworth is especially strong on the 1970s as you might expect from someone living through that decade as a maturing adult and his discerning observations of what was happening around this amazing surfeit of music is wittily and pithily observed.
One can have arguments with the albums contained here: and, one suspects, the author would only be too pleased to know such arguments are taking place- and he’s also short on recognising that post 1982 there have continued to be some wonderful examples of LP genius but this is the whole point of this book. It’s a point of view; an argument and, for this reader, I was only disappointed when the book finished. Joyous.
April 9, 2019
Oh No! I may be growing tired of David Hepworth....
I usually really enjoy his writing, I quite often don't agree with him but that leads to a rather pleasant argument with him in my own head where he can't talk back.
But this one disappointed me somewhat. He does talk a lot of bollocks of course, and is over-fond of a sweeping statement. I know that I'm not part of his target audience - I'm a bit younger and also more importantly female: Although I was there, I'm not part of the gang he conjures, but that usually doesn't bother me too much for the reasons above.
I used to find him interesting and informative. But this book, while it still has some bite, seems a little lazy. The choice to narrow his scope to just 15 years no doubt helped to keep the project to a manageable size but leaves a fractured and diminished story. And the shape of the story forms a bit of a depressing plunge as if he'd written so much, lost his enthusiasm and given up.
Shame. But I'm with him re 'Horses'...
I usually really enjoy his writing, I quite often don't agree with him but that leads to a rather pleasant argument with him in my own head where he can't talk back.
But this one disappointed me somewhat. He does talk a lot of bollocks of course, and is over-fond of a sweeping statement. I know that I'm not part of his target audience - I'm a bit younger and also more importantly female: Although I was there, I'm not part of the gang he conjures, but that usually doesn't bother me too much for the reasons above.
I used to find him interesting and informative. But this book, while it still has some bite, seems a little lazy. The choice to narrow his scope to just 15 years no doubt helped to keep the project to a manageable size but leaves a fractured and diminished story. And the shape of the story forms a bit of a depressing plunge as if he'd written so much, lost his enthusiasm and given up.
Shame. But I'm with him re 'Horses'...
August 21, 2019
In recent years David Hepworth has been pumping out excellent books on classic rock & pop in short order - this, his fourth, may be the best yet.
Here he charts the rise and fall of the long-playing pop record as an artistic statement and a cultural force, submitting that the glory years were 1967-1982. Before then, an album was a bunch of songs. Afterward, he supposes, technology fragmented the medium and distracted us from it - forty minutes of music certainly couldn’t command our undivided attention anymore.
Part of the pleasure of Hepworth’s writing is how unequivocal he is. He’s as convinced of the central argument here as in 1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year (where he insisted that 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album). One might quibble with him (as I do) on The Band’s second album being a masterpiece, or Give ‘Em Enough Rope being a waste of everybody’s time, but as always, he has the courage of his convictions, and shows his working in such an entertaining fashion.
We might also disagree with where to draw a line in the sand (1982 - Thriller, MTV and the ubiquity of the Sony Walkman), and here Hepworth does perhaps let stuffy nostalgia for the physical object of the vinyl LP cloud his judgement. Even children of the later CD era will have memories much like Hepworth’s - of gathering an encyclopaedic knowledge of artists they’d never yet heard from the pages of Melody Maker or NME, of saving up pocket money for a trip to the megastore, of setting aside an evening to absorb their favourite singer’s latest work - and so on.
What’s hard to argue with is that, by 2019, music’s value has vanished. It’s now rented rather than sought out; a huge chunk of everything ever recorded is on tap for a monthly fee that’s half the price you paid for your first CD in Woolworth’s. Songs are typically consumed within playlists. Often they’re heard through the tinniest of kitchen-table speakers (which is also recording your every conversation and muttered oath for marketing purposes), rather than sitting reverentially in front of hi-fi ‘separates’, puzzling over every lyric.
Hepworth is superb at outlining the forces that brought us to this point. He characterises the record execs who mostly did care about the music after all, and the tech giants who really didn’t. The contrast between a teenager strutting about town with an LP under their arm, and one privately soundtracking their life with a Walkman (or an iPod), is teased out neatly. There’s a particularly fascinating look at how, generation after generation, men are forever struggling to reconcile the music they really do like with that that they think they ought to like. Hepworth’s own example is his epiphany that Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma was ‘not him’ and exchanging it for the Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief. Hard to fault him there.
Here he charts the rise and fall of the long-playing pop record as an artistic statement and a cultural force, submitting that the glory years were 1967-1982. Before then, an album was a bunch of songs. Afterward, he supposes, technology fragmented the medium and distracted us from it - forty minutes of music certainly couldn’t command our undivided attention anymore.
Part of the pleasure of Hepworth’s writing is how unequivocal he is. He’s as convinced of the central argument here as in 1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year (where he insisted that 1971 was the annus mirabilis of the rock album). One might quibble with him (as I do) on The Band’s second album being a masterpiece, or Give ‘Em Enough Rope being a waste of everybody’s time, but as always, he has the courage of his convictions, and shows his working in such an entertaining fashion.
We might also disagree with where to draw a line in the sand (1982 - Thriller, MTV and the ubiquity of the Sony Walkman), and here Hepworth does perhaps let stuffy nostalgia for the physical object of the vinyl LP cloud his judgement. Even children of the later CD era will have memories much like Hepworth’s - of gathering an encyclopaedic knowledge of artists they’d never yet heard from the pages of Melody Maker or NME, of saving up pocket money for a trip to the megastore, of setting aside an evening to absorb their favourite singer’s latest work - and so on.
What’s hard to argue with is that, by 2019, music’s value has vanished. It’s now rented rather than sought out; a huge chunk of everything ever recorded is on tap for a monthly fee that’s half the price you paid for your first CD in Woolworth’s. Songs are typically consumed within playlists. Often they’re heard through the tinniest of kitchen-table speakers (which is also recording your every conversation and muttered oath for marketing purposes), rather than sitting reverentially in front of hi-fi ‘separates’, puzzling over every lyric.
Hepworth is superb at outlining the forces that brought us to this point. He characterises the record execs who mostly did care about the music after all, and the tech giants who really didn’t. The contrast between a teenager strutting about town with an LP under their arm, and one privately soundtracking their life with a Walkman (or an iPod), is teased out neatly. There’s a particularly fascinating look at how, generation after generation, men are forever struggling to reconcile the music they really do like with that that they think they ought to like. Hepworth’s own example is his epiphany that Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma was ‘not him’ and exchanging it for the Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief. Hard to fault him there.
August 11, 2025
In my pre-marriage days, whenever I moved into a new house, my first priority was always to set up my sound system. I would find a place for the turntable, situate the speakers in a strategic location, and get my records on a shelf where they were easily accessible. The dishes, silverware, clothes and bathroom items were all still packed in my car. They were of secondary importance. As David Hepworth writes, the record player was "the sole possession of any consequence" (p.132).
Many younger music listeners have no idea what I'm talking about, because they have always lived in the age of easily accessible, downloadable digital music. There was a time when, if you wanted to hear new music, you had to save your money, get yourself to the local music store, buy the record, and carry it under your arm back to your house to play on your turntable. Perhaps today that sounds like a hassle, but in some strange way, a thing's value tends to depreciate the easier you can get it. Today, music seems to be just about as valuable as the water that spews out of the kitchen spigot.
In this book, Hepworth gives a history of the glory days of the album (vinyl) format, which he claims began in 1967 with the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album, and essentially came to an end in 1982 with the release of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The beginning of the end was not actually the computer or the iPod or the smart phone, but the Walkman, which marked "the beginning of a convenience driven revolution in entertainment, a revolution that led to the world of today." (p.211). And in the world today, music is not discovered by an investment of time, patience and devotion, but by restless browsing and clicking. "Traveling and never arriving." Record collections don't represent the specific interests, passions and convictions of the listener, because all of us have access online to the biggest (and formless) record collection in the world. "Our dreams have come true. And now, as we're discovering, that's never a good thing." (p.267).
I don't mean to sound like a grumpy old luddite, and Hepworth definitely does not sound like that in this book. It's a book about the joy, reward and excitement of consuming music in a slower and more intentional way. Thankfully, there is a "sizable cohort of young enthusiasts who have rebelled against the way the rest of their generation consumes music and think that the LP record represents in some sense the proper way." (p.266). I'm not young anymore, but I am part of the rebellion.
Many younger music listeners have no idea what I'm talking about, because they have always lived in the age of easily accessible, downloadable digital music. There was a time when, if you wanted to hear new music, you had to save your money, get yourself to the local music store, buy the record, and carry it under your arm back to your house to play on your turntable. Perhaps today that sounds like a hassle, but in some strange way, a thing's value tends to depreciate the easier you can get it. Today, music seems to be just about as valuable as the water that spews out of the kitchen spigot.
In this book, Hepworth gives a history of the glory days of the album (vinyl) format, which he claims began in 1967 with the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album, and essentially came to an end in 1982 with the release of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The beginning of the end was not actually the computer or the iPod or the smart phone, but the Walkman, which marked "the beginning of a convenience driven revolution in entertainment, a revolution that led to the world of today." (p.211). And in the world today, music is not discovered by an investment of time, patience and devotion, but by restless browsing and clicking. "Traveling and never arriving." Record collections don't represent the specific interests, passions and convictions of the listener, because all of us have access online to the biggest (and formless) record collection in the world. "Our dreams have come true. And now, as we're discovering, that's never a good thing." (p.267).
I don't mean to sound like a grumpy old luddite, and Hepworth definitely does not sound like that in this book. It's a book about the joy, reward and excitement of consuming music in a slower and more intentional way. Thankfully, there is a "sizable cohort of young enthusiasts who have rebelled against the way the rest of their generation consumes music and think that the LP record represents in some sense the proper way." (p.266). I'm not young anymore, but I am part of the rebellion.
November 19, 2019
I have always enjoyed David Hepworth's writing, whether it be his music journalism for various publications or more recently the music based books that he has written and this one's no exception. Hepworth serves up a history of the rock/pop long playing record, from the Beatles 1967 release, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band through to Micheal Jackson's Thriller, in 1982. He picks Sgt Pepper as his starting point, as basically this was, in his opinion, the first proper album which didn't just contain '2 hit singles and a load of filler' and ends with Thriller, as from then on record companies were more interested in making money than the music. The chapters are written for each specific year and he describes the significant albums from those years and also the innovations in the recording of the music and in the music industry that came about during those years. How music went from a communal pursuit, where friends would gather round the stereo system listening to the latest albums to it becoming a singular activity where people listened on headphones to their 'Walkman' or to present day where we now listen to downloads on our phones.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book but like most music books I don't always agree with the author's view but that's music for you !! I am slightly younger than Mr Hepworth and my 'serious' music buying didn't start until the early 70's and therefore my taste is slightly different and my view of some records vary from his but that's probably because a lot of the earlier stuff I only discovered later in life. However a lot of the things he describes rang a lot of bells with me, especially how we had to hunt down particular records and also the pride one felt carrying a specific album about under ones arm as we walked about town. I always enjoy the tone of Mr Hepworth writing which I have difficulty explaining but he is very god at writing people/things down but in a humorous way and with some very witty rejoinders. I also enjoyed the 'appendix' at the end of the book where he gives a brief 'review' of the significant albums of each year that the book covers and it also gave me a few ideas of bands that need further exploration on my part.
I look forward to his next publication which is Rock'n'Roll A Level which I assume will be a a challenging quiz book by the sound of it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book but like most music books I don't always agree with the author's view but that's music for you !! I am slightly younger than Mr Hepworth and my 'serious' music buying didn't start until the early 70's and therefore my taste is slightly different and my view of some records vary from his but that's probably because a lot of the earlier stuff I only discovered later in life. However a lot of the things he describes rang a lot of bells with me, especially how we had to hunt down particular records and also the pride one felt carrying a specific album about under ones arm as we walked about town. I always enjoy the tone of Mr Hepworth writing which I have difficulty explaining but he is very god at writing people/things down but in a humorous way and with some very witty rejoinders. I also enjoyed the 'appendix' at the end of the book where he gives a brief 'review' of the significant albums of each year that the book covers and it also gave me a few ideas of bands that need further exploration on my part.
I look forward to his next publication which is Rock'n'Roll A Level which I assume will be a a challenging quiz book by the sound of it.
May 25, 2020
Breezy tour of the long-playing record, written as both memoir and cultural history. Some acts may not ring a bell to American audiences, especially those of us who embraced pop over artists who labored more over their art. (I don’t recall Television at all, nor Joy Division, so that’s maybe a true test of the power of Top 40 radio.) You had to hunt some of this music down in record bins, because the drive time DJs sure didn’t play it. There are some wonderful passages, like his outline of a standard record deal and the pages about The Making of Tusk. It’s a male perspective, though. For us girls, LPs were the main way we got to see our music crushes and we waited for albums to come out w photo inserts and posters. They wallpapered our rooms ... and hearts.
September 26, 2024
A book about the rise of the LP that's also rich with warm, funny personal memories (the tense "ceremony" of playing records, the equating of buying a record in 1971 to attending a football match) and a poignant document of how our consumption of media completely shifted until we all had access to the biggest record collection in the world. Working at HMV on Oxford Street, walking around with an LP under your arm, the revolution represented by the Sony Walkman...and so much more.
September 9, 2019
David Hepworth er en fenomenal forfatter. Tematikken er alltid pop og rock gjennom de siste 50-60 årene. I den siste boken tar han for seg LP-platens historie. Selv om forfatteren er 18 år eldre enn meg, kan jeg sterkt relatere meg til det han skriver om. Hvordan jeg som tenåring med en nyervervet platespiller lyttet til musikk på en helt annen måte. Med platecover og tekstark fikk jeg et veldig nært forhold til artistene og musikken. "A Fabulous Creation" vier ett kapittel til årene fra 1967 til 1982, årene forfatteren regner som LP-platens storhetstid, med "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Clubs Band" og "Thriller" som ytterpunktene. LPene var noe mer enn en samling låter. LPene formidlet en helhet. Fallet begynte da Sony lanserte sin walkman tidlig på 80-tallet. LPene tapte også terreng da CDen ble lansert kun få år etterpå og var langt på bak død og begravet da streamingen entret arenaen. Men alle disse nyvinningene har gjort musikken mer upersonlig. Dette er en utvikling som David Hepworth skildrer med innsikt, varme og humor. Mye nostalgi, men uten et eneste tilløp til surmagethet. Det er så velskrevet og underholdende at jeg blir enda mer glad i min gamle platesamling og litt stolt over at LPen har våknet til liv igjen.
June 1, 2021
A well-written personal take on the LP and the journey of it through records, cassettes, CDs, downloads until finally streaming
August 4, 2019
Even though I'm a Gen Xer and LPs were already in their dying years when I was a teen, I still get the melancholy feel of this book : but it's a pleasant nostalgia, not a whinge.
January 23, 2025
What an enjoyable, entertaining, enlightening account
I liked David Hepworth's 1971: Never a Dull Moment, a lot. There he argues that was the best year for rock music. Some of his insights about the rise of AOR and albums as Serious Statements get reworked here, but I think that A Fabulous Creation is even better. Although I am a decade younger than the author, his recollections of when all that mattered on what one could save up besides the barest of necessities was money for LPs ring true indeed. Furthermore, while he intersperses his own examples appropriately and wittily, he always remains aware that his personal predilections serve his larger intent. Beneath the readable, conversational, and relatable vignettes, Hepworth situates the rise of the forty or so minute, two-sided artifacts that represented so much more than their contents, grand or terrible as they might be. He is astute in analyzing within the fifteen-year span from Sgt Pepper to Thriller the shifts in pop culture, demographic impacts as the teen crowd aged, genres "balkanized," and technology kept evolving. He estimates eighteen months as even a true talent's creative peak...
Which makes for a fun game to play with anyone you'd be stuck with on a long car ride, as I attest: match your favorite artists with their album output (admittedly works best in a golden age, not now).
I laughed more than once aloud as I read, no easy feat for me. My Kindle copy is full of highlights. Hepworth hones that inimitably British style of smart journalism that few rock critics manage to sustain. When he mentions some of the big stars who've spoken with him, he doesn't sound snobbish, but genuinely eager to share what he's learned from them with us, as if we're up in his flat spinning our favorite discs, chatting about the latest rumors of a reclusive songwriter cult figure or an obscure pressing only as a rare import. And all this evoking a pre-Net, even pre-CD era when fans relied on a samizdat network of hearsay, hype, and hope tracking an LP down. Chance, word-of-mouth, review.
One note, given that his book takes its title from "Do the Strand," by Roxy Music. He claims its founding members "all" had University and/or art school educations, as a London bespoke coterie, when they assembled for their debut recording. But I believe jazz drummer Paul Thompson worked days as a Newcastle welder's apprentice on Ferry's Geordie home turf, lacking "higher education."
And a SoCal suggestion: Barney Hoskyns' Waiting for the Sun about the Seventies L.A. music scene discussed the role savvy P.R. played, aided and abetted by those Schlagers bargain-bin loss-leader Warner Brothers compilation samplers (for $1.99), in making WB a standout brand among hip listeners. This context would have enriched Hepworth's treatment of this inventive, and truly risk-taking for that major label, period as counterculture laid back into AoR. Although Hepworth's survey tilts towards Britain's massive cultural/ socio-economic alterations during these times, as expected.
I liked David Hepworth's 1971: Never a Dull Moment, a lot. There he argues that was the best year for rock music. Some of his insights about the rise of AOR and albums as Serious Statements get reworked here, but I think that A Fabulous Creation is even better. Although I am a decade younger than the author, his recollections of when all that mattered on what one could save up besides the barest of necessities was money for LPs ring true indeed. Furthermore, while he intersperses his own examples appropriately and wittily, he always remains aware that his personal predilections serve his larger intent. Beneath the readable, conversational, and relatable vignettes, Hepworth situates the rise of the forty or so minute, two-sided artifacts that represented so much more than their contents, grand or terrible as they might be. He is astute in analyzing within the fifteen-year span from Sgt Pepper to Thriller the shifts in pop culture, demographic impacts as the teen crowd aged, genres "balkanized," and technology kept evolving. He estimates eighteen months as even a true talent's creative peak...
Which makes for a fun game to play with anyone you'd be stuck with on a long car ride, as I attest: match your favorite artists with their album output (admittedly works best in a golden age, not now).
I laughed more than once aloud as I read, no easy feat for me. My Kindle copy is full of highlights. Hepworth hones that inimitably British style of smart journalism that few rock critics manage to sustain. When he mentions some of the big stars who've spoken with him, he doesn't sound snobbish, but genuinely eager to share what he's learned from them with us, as if we're up in his flat spinning our favorite discs, chatting about the latest rumors of a reclusive songwriter cult figure or an obscure pressing only as a rare import. And all this evoking a pre-Net, even pre-CD era when fans relied on a samizdat network of hearsay, hype, and hope tracking an LP down. Chance, word-of-mouth, review.
One note, given that his book takes its title from "Do the Strand," by Roxy Music. He claims its founding members "all" had University and/or art school educations, as a London bespoke coterie, when they assembled for their debut recording. But I believe jazz drummer Paul Thompson worked days as a Newcastle welder's apprentice on Ferry's Geordie home turf, lacking "higher education."
And a SoCal suggestion: Barney Hoskyns' Waiting for the Sun about the Seventies L.A. music scene discussed the role savvy P.R. played, aided and abetted by those Schlagers bargain-bin loss-leader Warner Brothers compilation samplers (for $1.99), in making WB a standout brand among hip listeners. This context would have enriched Hepworth's treatment of this inventive, and truly risk-taking for that major label, period as counterculture laid back into AoR. Although Hepworth's survey tilts towards Britain's massive cultural/ socio-economic alterations during these times, as expected.
July 11, 2021
It all starts with 5 simple words. 'I let my L.P.'s go'. Fortunately I didn't but I later joined the masses in seeking digital equivalents of my humongous vinyl library.
As he proved with '1971 -Never a Dull moment' and 'Uncommon People', David Hepworth is a master when it comes to philosophising on Rock Music. This time around he examines the halcyon days between 1967 and 1982 when the L.P. really was a 'fabulous creation'. When recording artists really made an album. In his estimation it reached the giddy heights when Sergeant Pepper taught his band to play in 1967 and continued to save our lives until our final vinyl thrills were delivered by Michael Jackson in 1982. Given the dramatic way the music industry changed after that date it is difficult to argue against Hepworth's contention. Although maybe the massive year of 1966 could have kicked it off? Pet Sounds, Revolver, Aftermath anyone?
What makes this book so entertaining is Hepworth's palpable devotion to the subject. He's critical and irreverent when he needs to be, he's knowledgeable without being a smart arse and he's not afraid to delve into the sheer nostalgia of it all. He dedicates the book to those who know how it feels to carry an album down the street. Oh yeah I remember deliberately removing "Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton" from its bag just to walk the walk. Then Traffic, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Leonard Cohen and on it went.
You can smell the albums the author discusses as they slide out of their plastic sleeves. You will remember the gatherings when all your mates congregated around the record player and waited for the stylus to hit the groove of the latest release with a 'thwonk'. Then respectful silence as you held your breath in anticipation. Of course it's down to us of a certain age to remember all the nuances that Hepworth describes. Like the patriarch of the family refusing to play Donovan on the stereogram because it may tarnish the new stylus. And it triggered a memory of a late sixties high school party when I had the audacity to remove The Beatles 'White Album' from the turntable and replace it with Led Zeppelin One proclaiming that "here is the future of rock and roll!" I may have been a pretentious wanker but 'Dazed and Confused' certainly stopped them in their tracks for a while.
I seriously wanted to give this excellent book five stars but I have to withhold half a star because in an effort to cover every facet of the music industry from artists to producers and promoters to consumers David Hepworth does very occasionally trip himself up with verbosity and repetition. A bit like me.
As he proved with '1971 -Never a Dull moment' and 'Uncommon People', David Hepworth is a master when it comes to philosophising on Rock Music. This time around he examines the halcyon days between 1967 and 1982 when the L.P. really was a 'fabulous creation'. When recording artists really made an album. In his estimation it reached the giddy heights when Sergeant Pepper taught his band to play in 1967 and continued to save our lives until our final vinyl thrills were delivered by Michael Jackson in 1982. Given the dramatic way the music industry changed after that date it is difficult to argue against Hepworth's contention. Although maybe the massive year of 1966 could have kicked it off? Pet Sounds, Revolver, Aftermath anyone?
What makes this book so entertaining is Hepworth's palpable devotion to the subject. He's critical and irreverent when he needs to be, he's knowledgeable without being a smart arse and he's not afraid to delve into the sheer nostalgia of it all. He dedicates the book to those who know how it feels to carry an album down the street. Oh yeah I remember deliberately removing "Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton" from its bag just to walk the walk. Then Traffic, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Leonard Cohen and on it went.
You can smell the albums the author discusses as they slide out of their plastic sleeves. You will remember the gatherings when all your mates congregated around the record player and waited for the stylus to hit the groove of the latest release with a 'thwonk'. Then respectful silence as you held your breath in anticipation. Of course it's down to us of a certain age to remember all the nuances that Hepworth describes. Like the patriarch of the family refusing to play Donovan on the stereogram because it may tarnish the new stylus. And it triggered a memory of a late sixties high school party when I had the audacity to remove The Beatles 'White Album' from the turntable and replace it with Led Zeppelin One proclaiming that "here is the future of rock and roll!" I may have been a pretentious wanker but 'Dazed and Confused' certainly stopped them in their tracks for a while.
I seriously wanted to give this excellent book five stars but I have to withhold half a star because in an effort to cover every facet of the music industry from artists to producers and promoters to consumers David Hepworth does very occasionally trip himself up with verbosity and repetition. A bit like me.
December 28, 2020
I fell in love with rock music in 1964 when I first heard ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ at a movie-treat birthday party. I was nine. I bought my first LP in 1968 - a record by The Beatles - and spent much of my free time listening to the radio and saving money to buy more LPs. By the time I stopped buying LPs I had about 500 albums. I loved them. I loved the look of them, the feel of them, the music and dreams they held. I read the magazines that urged me to buy the latest release by … whoever it was at the time. I spent hours in the local record stores, got to know the staff, got their recommendations and they understood my tastes and helped me build my record collection.
When CDs took over as an extraordinarily convenient music carrier I sold some of my records and stuck the rest in a cupboard, retrieved every now and then to look at covers or check something or other. I now have almost 2000 CDs and my son has all my records. Fair deal, perhaps, now that I’ve downsized homes and have ditched the stereo system that cost me a couple of month’s wages all those years ago.
David Hepworth knows his stuff. He writes with authority and has delivered an entertaining and informative book about the rise and fall of the LP. Along the way he has captured the mood and mind of boomers like me. He laments (or so I interpret his text) the demise of the album and what it meant to musicians and fans. So do I (says the bloke with 25,000 tracks in his digital collection). As I read the final chapters I wondered why on earth musos still made ‘albums’. What is an ‘album’? It got all too philosophical.
I particularly loved Hepworth’s pithy little ‘reviews’ of selected albums from the years under discussion when LPs ruled the world (1967 - 1982). There’s nothing like revisiting an album you loved after 40 or 50 years and finding it … well, less then exciting … or just as damn good as you always thought it was. I am constantly reminded that my musical tastes have changed over the years, yet many of my favourite albums from the 60s and 70s are still well and truly flogged on my most recent playlists.
I’ve enjoyed Hepworth’s reflections, and will happily get into the several other books of his I have not yet found time for.
Four stars.
When CDs took over as an extraordinarily convenient music carrier I sold some of my records and stuck the rest in a cupboard, retrieved every now and then to look at covers or check something or other. I now have almost 2000 CDs and my son has all my records. Fair deal, perhaps, now that I’ve downsized homes and have ditched the stereo system that cost me a couple of month’s wages all those years ago.
David Hepworth knows his stuff. He writes with authority and has delivered an entertaining and informative book about the rise and fall of the LP. Along the way he has captured the mood and mind of boomers like me. He laments (or so I interpret his text) the demise of the album and what it meant to musicians and fans. So do I (says the bloke with 25,000 tracks in his digital collection). As I read the final chapters I wondered why on earth musos still made ‘albums’. What is an ‘album’? It got all too philosophical.
I particularly loved Hepworth’s pithy little ‘reviews’ of selected albums from the years under discussion when LPs ruled the world (1967 - 1982). There’s nothing like revisiting an album you loved after 40 or 50 years and finding it … well, less then exciting … or just as damn good as you always thought it was. I am constantly reminded that my musical tastes have changed over the years, yet many of my favourite albums from the 60s and 70s are still well and truly flogged on my most recent playlists.
I’ve enjoyed Hepworth’s reflections, and will happily get into the several other books of his I have not yet found time for.
Four stars.
April 22, 2019
I wish I could have had this book given to me in about 1968 so that I would have spent less time listening to the wrong music and buying the “wrong” records. However I only had about 15-20 LPs and later any number of cassettes that I listened to in hard rotation and spent far more time riffling through the racks at Our Price Records than was good for me. Actually spending money on an album was agonising - you had invested so much in the purchase the thought that it may not be any good after all was almost unbearable. Now I can just ask Alexa to play any track off any album ever just be talking in my normal voice. But this isn’t the same as studying an album sleeve minutely and going through the ritual of sliding the record out of the inner sleeve without touching the vinyl except with the flats of the palms on the very edge. I still love the “kudunck” of the scratch on my pressing of David Bowie’s “Changes” from Hunky Dory and I thought the scratch on Edward H Davies’ Hen Ffordd Cymraeg O Fyw was a deliberate part of the music of the track “Cadw Draw”, so perfectly did it fit with the beat ( Dadadada kudunck, Dadadada Kudunck...) and I now have to mentally insert it when listening to a digital version.
The best sort of nostalgia in that you learn so much from each page.
The best sort of nostalgia in that you learn so much from each page.
June 27, 2019
And now for something completely different
The LP. The album, as It was hipper to call them. The golden age, when you walked around with one under your arm, because th e cover would be instantly recognisable to those who mattered, and would mark you out as who you were . In the smallish town I spent my formative years in, I walked around for days with Family's 'Music from a Dolls' House' under my arm. I got a boyfriend because of it. I've still got that album. Albums were precious, and the experience of listening was a communal one. We shared music, in those days. This is about the albums, and the bands who made them, and the people who made the bands who made them.sound OK enough (mostly) so you could listen and enjoy without being on the same drugs the band were on. This is a cultural history of rather a long moment. It is very good. Read it. Like we did the lyrics in the back of the album cover. The title, as any fule kno, is from Roxy Music's 'Do The Strand', a fabulous creation indeed, which also boasts the line 'Rhododendron, it's a nice flower'.
The LP. The album, as It was hipper to call them. The golden age, when you walked around with one under your arm, because th e cover would be instantly recognisable to those who mattered, and would mark you out as who you were . In the smallish town I spent my formative years in, I walked around for days with Family's 'Music from a Dolls' House' under my arm. I got a boyfriend because of it. I've still got that album. Albums were precious, and the experience of listening was a communal one. We shared music, in those days. This is about the albums, and the bands who made them, and the people who made the bands who made them.sound OK enough (mostly) so you could listen and enjoy without being on the same drugs the band were on. This is a cultural history of rather a long moment. It is very good. Read it. Like we did the lyrics in the back of the album cover. The title, as any fule kno, is from Roxy Music's 'Do The Strand', a fabulous creation indeed, which also boasts the line 'Rhododendron, it's a nice flower'.
April 11, 2019
I’ve been a fan of David Hepworth’s writing for many years and his Schrodinger-like approach to music (holding both the option that music is hugely important and life-affirming and that music is, well, only music at one and the same time) has huge appeal. I may disagree with many of his opinions (Black Sabbath? Good grief...) but they are always well-argued and extremely articulate.
Enjoyed this latest book immensely and it has made me not only re-visit my LP collection (yes, I still have some) but I have, as suggested at the very end of the book, started to set aside that little 45 minute period to do nothing but sit and listen.
Which is no bad thing!
Enjoyed this latest book immensely and it has made me not only re-visit my LP collection (yes, I still have some) but I have, as suggested at the very end of the book, started to set aside that little 45 minute period to do nothing but sit and listen.
Which is no bad thing!
May 19, 2020
Very enjoyable and readable. Again, a star deducted for excess padding/filler. There is a better/shorter book in here. Seems to be a Hepworth generic problem.
September 23, 2022
I bought my first LP when I was about fourteen, it was a second hand mono copy of The Beatles 'Revolver'. With a minimal awareness of the way records were made, packaged, and sold I bought hundreds of albums over the next fifteen years. I also bought lots of singles, invested heavily in tapes to record on, and borrowed the best of of many other peoples' record collections. I was a child, then an adult, of the vinyl era who had no interest in CD's when they first appeared. They sounded suspiciously clean and the artists whose albums were most popular in the new CD format were in my view too tightly and tidily packaged. I liked the Roy Harper albums, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons, The Grateful Dead, etc. Male melancholy with solid arrangements and tunes were where my head was at.
I was not buying records when the first King Crimson album came out, not even when 'Dark Side Of The Moon' first came out, though I knew older boys who played 'Tubular Bells' along with their early 70's Bowie albums where we puzzled over the name dropping in the lyrics. Elsewhere I saw 'Welcome Back My Friends.... ', the triple live album by ELP and it was just not 'me'. So there was a lot of detail in this book that was new to me, which was very welcome.
I first remember seeing David Hepworth on the Old Grey Whistle Test circa 1984. So I was a late-comer to discovering David Hepworth. He had at least ten years over me as a young buyer of music. It is as a buyer and seller of music that his voice rings clearest here. A lot of what he has to say about making music, the production and consumption of LP's, has been said before but not as neatly as presented here.
One of the many small epiphanies in the writing come when he shoe-horns a mention of Pink Floyd into a paragraph about Donna Summer, quote 'Nobody knew quite how to react to the sound of a woman, a married woman with one child no less, bringing herself to climax over what seemed like an amiable piece of travelogue music, kept on track by a more excited heartbeat than the one that had begun 'Dark Side Of The Moon''.
The book also works as a guide to the popular culture of the 1960's and 70's and 80's, where what is on television and was being shown at the cinema sits well alongside facts about LP's and musicians. Hepworth has plenty to say about the 1980's marketing of music by acts like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and ZZ Top, where the marketing so influences the music that gets made that the word 'calculated' seems unavoidable. But Hepworth is generous to a fault about simply recording the process of the music being made, and how and where marketing influences everything. It was strange to imagine eight track cassettes of albums by Bruce Springsteen still being manufactured for sale in 1986, but that is the sort of loose detail that Hepworth delves into.
Two plus points in the books favour are the list of recommended albums at the back, and further back than the albums list and bibliography is the index of names and where they are mentioned in the text.
I liked his record business insider account of Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk' 'being the first million dollar album', but surely a similar but less familiar story could have been told about 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' by Yes, along the same lines of 'wealthy and able musicians set up camp in the studio less to make music and more to live there amid all the signs of their wealth that they could request given their wealth', and with the Yes album it reached No 1 in America too, whereas 'Tusk' never topped any chart. Perhaps the relative lack of drugs, different sense of a tune and an arrangement with Yes was what made the story of adapting the studio for atmosphere less enticing as told through them.
The chapter on how three London boys travelled the world from the 1960's onward, Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, and (I think) Steve Marriot, was also instructive about the mix of character, talent, and luck that was required to survive the music business in America.
My only wish is that David Hepworth made his books harder to read, that is I wish he put in more stories and more detail in his stories to add complexity to his overall message, the way, say fellow journalist Peter Doggett, does. But both authors write well, and the music industry provides enough drama for anyone to write about.
That said the list at the end of each chapter, and at the end of the book, must be enough for anyone to have a go at listening to, to imagine why 1971 seemed so natural at the time but since has become so special as musical years went.
I was not buying records when the first King Crimson album came out, not even when 'Dark Side Of The Moon' first came out, though I knew older boys who played 'Tubular Bells' along with their early 70's Bowie albums where we puzzled over the name dropping in the lyrics. Elsewhere I saw 'Welcome Back My Friends.... ', the triple live album by ELP and it was just not 'me'. So there was a lot of detail in this book that was new to me, which was very welcome.
I first remember seeing David Hepworth on the Old Grey Whistle Test circa 1984. So I was a late-comer to discovering David Hepworth. He had at least ten years over me as a young buyer of music. It is as a buyer and seller of music that his voice rings clearest here. A lot of what he has to say about making music, the production and consumption of LP's, has been said before but not as neatly as presented here.
One of the many small epiphanies in the writing come when he shoe-horns a mention of Pink Floyd into a paragraph about Donna Summer, quote 'Nobody knew quite how to react to the sound of a woman, a married woman with one child no less, bringing herself to climax over what seemed like an amiable piece of travelogue music, kept on track by a more excited heartbeat than the one that had begun 'Dark Side Of The Moon''.
The book also works as a guide to the popular culture of the 1960's and 70's and 80's, where what is on television and was being shown at the cinema sits well alongside facts about LP's and musicians. Hepworth has plenty to say about the 1980's marketing of music by acts like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and ZZ Top, where the marketing so influences the music that gets made that the word 'calculated' seems unavoidable. But Hepworth is generous to a fault about simply recording the process of the music being made, and how and where marketing influences everything. It was strange to imagine eight track cassettes of albums by Bruce Springsteen still being manufactured for sale in 1986, but that is the sort of loose detail that Hepworth delves into.
Two plus points in the books favour are the list of recommended albums at the back, and further back than the albums list and bibliography is the index of names and where they are mentioned in the text.
I liked his record business insider account of Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk' 'being the first million dollar album', but surely a similar but less familiar story could have been told about 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' by Yes, along the same lines of 'wealthy and able musicians set up camp in the studio less to make music and more to live there amid all the signs of their wealth that they could request given their wealth', and with the Yes album it reached No 1 in America too, whereas 'Tusk' never topped any chart. Perhaps the relative lack of drugs, different sense of a tune and an arrangement with Yes was what made the story of adapting the studio for atmosphere less enticing as told through them.
The chapter on how three London boys travelled the world from the 1960's onward, Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, and (I think) Steve Marriot, was also instructive about the mix of character, talent, and luck that was required to survive the music business in America.
My only wish is that David Hepworth made his books harder to read, that is I wish he put in more stories and more detail in his stories to add complexity to his overall message, the way, say fellow journalist Peter Doggett, does. But both authors write well, and the music industry provides enough drama for anyone to write about.
That said the list at the end of each chapter, and at the end of the book, must be enough for anyone to have a go at listening to, to imagine why 1971 seemed so natural at the time but since has become so special as musical years went.
December 29, 2023
I like David Hepworth's writing style; easy-going, often humorous, never vicious. I read his 1971 - Never A Dull Moment in 2022, so when I received A Fabulous Creation as an Xmas gift, it went straight to the top of my reading pile.
It comes over to me as a combination of an extended love poem to the vinyl LP, and a quick-fire summary of the LP-producing industry (not always music) from 1967 to 1982. We start, appropriately-enough, with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Band & end with the music industry pretty much in disarray, though with the glimmer of a substantial sales pickup for the vinyl format.
Indeed just the day this review was written (and the book finished) I read a news article about how 6 million vinyl LP's were sold in 2023 in the UK, the highest amount for 33 years. '33 years' though would put us back to 1990, and vinyl sales had fallen-off-a-cliff long before then, so there's a lot of ground to make up on say, the 1970s. Nonetheless, the rising popularity of vinyl is one of the few upbeat stories of modern times.
I, like so many of my generation, gave-up most of my vinyl LP's in the early few years of the new century. Even so I hadn't taken-up CD's until 1992, and only c=because I'd purchased a CD in a record shop in York & didn't have a CD player at home to play it! A few weeks later and I'd purchased a Denon unit and some bookshelf speakers. At some point my household didn't have a vinyl record player, though that was fixed in 2002.
Hepworth tends to stray a bit, not least in his efforts to make A Fabulous Creation appeal across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, though he and his friends and acquaintance in the early 70's might have been doing so, no-one I've ever met has a slightest interest in The Band beyond their final gig, filmed as The Last Waltz and I've yet to meet anyone born in Britain with the slightest interest in Joni Mitchell.
That aside though, Hepworth does provide a terrific chapter about comedy LP's, beginning with Bob Newhart ('Hi Bob!' if you watch For All Mankind) and finishing with Derek & Clive. It's worthwhile recollecting that not all best-selling LP's were hit-parade-intended releases; indeed the first LP I ever purchased was Geoff Love & his Orchestra's Big War Movie Themes (hint: the theme to 633 Squadron at deafening volume is an uplifting experience!)
Some references though are strangely missing. Led Zeppelin for instance only receive cursory comments, even though they ruled-the-roost for LP heavy-rock sales worldwide for much of the first half of the 1970s. Likewise, when I was an album-buying teen, everyone I knew owned a copy of Deep Purples Made in Japan. There's no mention of either band or album.
Despite those, and some other rather glaring errors, like the absence of ELO's New World Record and Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds, and a fixation on Tusk which an editor should have asked to have trimmed, A Fabulous Creation is a worthwhile and interesting read.
It comes over to me as a combination of an extended love poem to the vinyl LP, and a quick-fire summary of the LP-producing industry (not always music) from 1967 to 1982. We start, appropriately-enough, with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Band & end with the music industry pretty much in disarray, though with the glimmer of a substantial sales pickup for the vinyl format.
Indeed just the day this review was written (and the book finished) I read a news article about how 6 million vinyl LP's were sold in 2023 in the UK, the highest amount for 33 years. '33 years' though would put us back to 1990, and vinyl sales had fallen-off-a-cliff long before then, so there's a lot of ground to make up on say, the 1970s. Nonetheless, the rising popularity of vinyl is one of the few upbeat stories of modern times.
I, like so many of my generation, gave-up most of my vinyl LP's in the early few years of the new century. Even so I hadn't taken-up CD's until 1992, and only c=because I'd purchased a CD in a record shop in York & didn't have a CD player at home to play it! A few weeks later and I'd purchased a Denon unit and some bookshelf speakers. At some point my household didn't have a vinyl record player, though that was fixed in 2002.
Hepworth tends to stray a bit, not least in his efforts to make A Fabulous Creation appeal across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, though he and his friends and acquaintance in the early 70's might have been doing so, no-one I've ever met has a slightest interest in The Band beyond their final gig, filmed as The Last Waltz and I've yet to meet anyone born in Britain with the slightest interest in Joni Mitchell.
That aside though, Hepworth does provide a terrific chapter about comedy LP's, beginning with Bob Newhart ('Hi Bob!' if you watch For All Mankind) and finishing with Derek & Clive. It's worthwhile recollecting that not all best-selling LP's were hit-parade-intended releases; indeed the first LP I ever purchased was Geoff Love & his Orchestra's Big War Movie Themes (hint: the theme to 633 Squadron at deafening volume is an uplifting experience!)
Some references though are strangely missing. Led Zeppelin for instance only receive cursory comments, even though they ruled-the-roost for LP heavy-rock sales worldwide for much of the first half of the 1970s. Likewise, when I was an album-buying teen, everyone I knew owned a copy of Deep Purples Made in Japan. There's no mention of either band or album.
Despite those, and some other rather glaring errors, like the absence of ELO's New World Record and Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds, and a fixation on Tusk which an editor should have asked to have trimmed, A Fabulous Creation is a worthwhile and interesting read.
June 7, 2020
One of the few high points of 2020’s coronavirus lockdown has been the ‘Word in Your Attic’ videos on You Tune between David Hepworth, his longtime friend & collaborator, Mark Ellen and a guest just shooting the breeze, or in their vernacular ‘taking a trip to b*ll*cks island’. Hepworth is a laconic, northern Eeyore balancing out the Tiggerish southern enthusiasm of Ellen. I’m slightly too young to have experienced them on Whistle Test, and missed their tenure on Smash Hits - but they’ve been a constant in my life since the days of Q, Mojo and the much missed Word Magazine.
This is Hepworth’s 4th book and this time he focuses his attention on the heyday of the 12 inch vinyl LP - a remarkably short period between 1967’s Sgt. Pepper and 1982’s Thriller.
Between those two dates he writes a witty yet erudite paean to the sheer romance of playing music - which for the period in question was as much about saying who you were (or wanted to be) as anything else. The book is also partly a social history of the period - by looking at some of the albums released in each year he also charts the transformation of the music business into the the music industry, where musicians were much more accountable to the men in suits. There are insights and belly laughs on every page, and the great joy of reading this (which I did in less than 24 hours) was playing some of the albums he wrote about, in their entirety, as I was doing so. Something I rarely do now since the advent of iTunes and digital streaming. Something which has been lost was - for a few hours at least - conjured back up.
This is Hepworth’s 4th book and this time he focuses his attention on the heyday of the 12 inch vinyl LP - a remarkably short period between 1967’s Sgt. Pepper and 1982’s Thriller.
Between those two dates he writes a witty yet erudite paean to the sheer romance of playing music - which for the period in question was as much about saying who you were (or wanted to be) as anything else. The book is also partly a social history of the period - by looking at some of the albums released in each year he also charts the transformation of the music business into the the music industry, where musicians were much more accountable to the men in suits. There are insights and belly laughs on every page, and the great joy of reading this (which I did in less than 24 hours) was playing some of the albums he wrote about, in their entirety, as I was doing so. Something I rarely do now since the advent of iTunes and digital streaming. Something which has been lost was - for a few hours at least - conjured back up.
June 20, 2019
This is the third book of Hepworth’s I’ve read. Each draws on his long career as a music writer and each serves as an affectionate elegy for the rock’n’roll era and with it the twilight of the baby boom, of which I am a late entry.
Like the 1971 book and the Pop Stars collection, Hepworth uses the modern history of the long playing record (which he traces from Sergeant Pepper in 1967 to Thriller in 1983) to essentially link together a series of anecdotes around historical landmarks - like the shift from analog to digital recording or the evolution of the live album.
He deftly captures the romance and long lost joy of buying a new record, taking it home for the first time, taking the disc out of the sleeve and listening to it all the way through while devouring every inch of the cover art. The contrast with the casual ubiquity and commodification of streamed music today is stark. There was a ritual to listening to music back then. And unlike now it was a communal activity.
As much an economic and social history as a cultural one, this book is a joy. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, yet at once sharply perceptive, rueful and wryly nostalgic. Best of all, it makes you want to go back and listen to all those albums again, on vinyl of course.
Oh, and I agree with him about Television’s Marquee Moon - a lot of fuss about not much at all, in retrospect.
Like the 1971 book and the Pop Stars collection, Hepworth uses the modern history of the long playing record (which he traces from Sergeant Pepper in 1967 to Thriller in 1983) to essentially link together a series of anecdotes around historical landmarks - like the shift from analog to digital recording or the evolution of the live album.
He deftly captures the romance and long lost joy of buying a new record, taking it home for the first time, taking the disc out of the sleeve and listening to it all the way through while devouring every inch of the cover art. The contrast with the casual ubiquity and commodification of streamed music today is stark. There was a ritual to listening to music back then. And unlike now it was a communal activity.
As much an economic and social history as a cultural one, this book is a joy. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, yet at once sharply perceptive, rueful and wryly nostalgic. Best of all, it makes you want to go back and listen to all those albums again, on vinyl of course.
Oh, and I agree with him about Television’s Marquee Moon - a lot of fuss about not much at all, in retrospect.
December 22, 2023
I had already consumed a couple of Hepworth's most enjoyable books about the rock music industry but this love letter to the long-playing album is perhaps my favourite, so far. It helps that the author & I are near contemporaries & his selections of milestone albums is not too far from my own. But he manages to reproduce, for those not born as baby boomers, what it was like, in the late 60s, to first play a work of musical art from start to finish in rapt silence, even if in the company of others. I too remember the awe I experienced as the needle dropped on 21st Century Schizoid Man, from In The Court Of The Crimson King, & how I remained in that state till the fading notes of the title track 40-odd minutes later. There are many other memories, beginning with Sgt Peppers & continuing through prog, glam, disco, punk & beyond. If your youth was played out to a musical soundtrack, like mine was, you must get this. PS I read an actual book, with pages, but the only version listed in Goodreads was this coverless ebook. The actual cover features a photo of Bob Dylan lowering the stylus onto one of his favourite albums.
October 2, 2025
I think I would describe this book as a load of stories about rock music, loosely based around a theme of the LP record. It meanders a bit, and a better editor might have given it more of a structure to help the reader find their way. Nevertheless, it’s fun. Hepworth’s stories are very good ones. It’s difficult to know if you’re not a person of a certain age, whether you would enjoy it. I am of that age, and I did. I said “person”, but I suspect women would be less impressed by this paean to the LP than old blokes.
On the whole, I think Hepworth is too obsessed by the vinyl manifestation of the album. I was mightily glad when I could buy something that was guaranteed not to jump or click, because of some small impediment. And I still like to play albums in their entirety, even on streaming devices. Having said that, I was mightily pleased when my eldest son bought a turntable recently, so that I could buy vinyl again, even if it was to give away to somebody else.
On the whole, I think Hepworth is too obsessed by the vinyl manifestation of the album. I was mightily glad when I could buy something that was guaranteed not to jump or click, because of some small impediment. And I still like to play albums in their entirety, even on streaming devices. Having said that, I was mightily pleased when my eldest son bought a turntable recently, so that I could buy vinyl again, even if it was to give away to somebody else.
August 5, 2019
An enthralling and entertaining journey through the golden age of the long-playing album, starting with the release of “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967 running through to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in 1982. Along the way, David Hepworth weaves in themes such as the art of a great album, the rise and fall of the comedy album, the similar trajectories of the music press and cash-in live albums, the age of MTV, and the launch of new LP formats like the cassette, the compact disc and the Walkman. Hepworth writes as if bearing a perpetually-raised eyebrow, always ready to puncture the pomposity of the preening idiots who populate so much of the music industry. Fans of his most recent books such as “1971: never a dull moment” and “Uncommon People” will much to fascinate them here.
May 23, 2022
I remember bringing my copy of DSOTM home, which I'd had to save up for, and putting my head between the two speakers of my parents' very crappy stereo system, in order to get the full stereo experience. I also remember inviting friends round to listen to it. And that's what we did: we listened; for 36+ glorious minutes of magic. I also remember dumping my third vinyl copy (the other two being irreparably damaged by poor styluses) in favour of the CD...
David Hepworth, in this wonderful book, brings one back to that era when the album was king. When artists made albums to be listened to in sequence and in their entirety; when albums weren't just a collection of 'tunes' to be collected and discarded. The digitalisation of music is certainly more convenient and gives one wider access to different genres and styles but the album was an artefact, a thing of its time and place, an experience and a conversation.
Forty years after my 'album years' I found myself in a bookshop in Oxford listening to a quadrophonic eight-track cassette a local man had found hidden away in his loft. We all sat, we album-years-folk, and listened in rapturous silence, as we had done decades before, to Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon'.
David Hepworth, in this wonderful book, brings one back to that era when the album was king. When artists made albums to be listened to in sequence and in their entirety; when albums weren't just a collection of 'tunes' to be collected and discarded. The digitalisation of music is certainly more convenient and gives one wider access to different genres and styles but the album was an artefact, a thing of its time and place, an experience and a conversation.
Forty years after my 'album years' I found myself in a bookshop in Oxford listening to a quadrophonic eight-track cassette a local man had found hidden away in his loft. We all sat, we album-years-folk, and listened in rapturous silence, as we had done decades before, to Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon'.
July 8, 2019
'A Fabulous Creation' is a highly enjoyable potted history of the glory days of the LP - focusing primarily on the period 1967 to 1983, and the respective releases of 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' and Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. David Hepworth traces the highs and lows of the era, the successes and failures, and the ways in which the pastime of listening to music was transformed. One of my favourite things about Hepworth's writing is his unwillingness to just embrace the tired old tropes about pop music, and challenge some of the hype whilst not sounding remotely cynical. There's a clear love of the material discussed here without being blind to its excesses and flaws. Good stuff.
March 29, 2023
Liked this book overall and it achieved the objective of chronicling the history of the LP, showing the link between object and art, and reflecting the societal changes that impacted record making and record buying.
I had some issues with the white/straight/male focus (with a few exceptions) and a few heteronormative generalisations that wound me up (“men did this, women did this”). I guess a reflection of the author’s generation and the period that was the main concern of the book… but even so.
Also found the conclusions about the future of recorded music a bit pessimistic and overly nostalgic.
I had some issues with the white/straight/male focus (with a few exceptions) and a few heteronormative generalisations that wound me up (“men did this, women did this”). I guess a reflection of the author’s generation and the period that was the main concern of the book… but even so.
Also found the conclusions about the future of recorded music a bit pessimistic and overly nostalgic.
August 5, 2025
I was never a collector of LPs (money was tight and I had better stuff to spend my hard earned cash) so this book was definitely not for me. But I read it mainly to have a better understanding of the music industry and transitions from LP to cassettes to CDs etc. I did spend stupid wasted countless hours recording songs directly from the radio to reel tapes. Which I then rarely bothered to play back. Once CDs came out, I of course copied hundreds of library CDs for my personal collection. Again, I rarely even bothered to listen to like 95% of the copies. So not being a die-hard fan of the mystic of LPs, this book was wasted on me.
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