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| Where
Have All the Good Times Gone? the rise and fall of the record industry |
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| Shelled out for the hardback and annoyed to
find that paperback buyers get a longer book? Read what you missed
right here What people said about the book they're all calling 'WHATGTG?': "I loved it. It gave me full glee and made the blood rush through my veins." Victor Lewis-Smith “This remarkable book...This wonderful book...Louis Barfe tells this absorbing tale with wit [and] accuracy...this is a winner.” Sir Tim Rice, Literary Review “Corporate histories are seldom lively reading...Barfe's book crackles and hisses with dinner-party trivia...” Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph “Louis Barfe's amazingly comprehensive history...if the record industry dies, this book would make a decent epitaph.” Doug Johnstone, Scotland on Sunday “...combines a weighty respect for his subject with a healthy dose of cynicism.” Claire Allfree, Metro Happy the man who is paid for his hobby. For years I've been obsessed with records. Not just the music and the musicians, but everything else. Where was Hayes, Middlesex? What was Super Emitex? What did FFRR and FFSS stand for? Why did the Beatles records have a pound sign on the label?* So, when the prospect of writing a book about the complete and utter history of the business came up, I jumped at it. It's the result of two years' truffling, interviewing (during which I got to meet heroes like George Avakian - the man behind the Ellington at Newport LP - and a fair few of the people who made Decca such an amazing record company in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Hugh Mendl and Ray Horricks) and, finally, scribbling. I'm really rather proud of it. If it had been written by someone else, I'd be thinking 'It's informative, accurate and surprisingly easy to read, despite the density of factual material. I doff my hat to the scholar responsible'. But it wasn't written by someone else, which pleases me greatly. |
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| Given the current state of the industry, the final chapter makes pretty grim reading, but there should be enough anecdotal goodness throughout to keep most readers a-smiling. Extracts from the book will be appearing here shortly, in the hope that they will entice you into buying a copy, thus ensuring the continued well-being of the bloke and the dog in the top right hand corner. In the mean time, here are some audio downloads and some links intended to enhance the whole Where Have All the Good Times Gone? experience. If, at any time, the cabin should lose pressure... |
| Just in
case you need any more persuasion, here's the jacket blurb: Louis Barfe’s elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. In what is the first book to consider the development of the music business on both sides of the Atlantic, Barfe’s journey starts with the first ever record to be played on a tin-foil cylinder phonograph, and arrives in the present to meet an industry in disarray. He shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In the years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, hucksters, impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music (and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs. ‘Where Have All The Good Times Gone?’ also charts the decline of classical music, the emergence of ‘high fidelity’, LPs, stereo cassettes and, in 1982, the revolution that arrived with the compact disc. The end of the 1990s ushered in a period of profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music available online have traumatic and potentially disastrous implications for the industry. To this I would add only that the industry is equally under threat from its own inability to grasp the potential of the new technology and use it to their own ends. Now run along nicely and buy the book. |
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* To answer all of these questions in the order they were posed: on the Great Western main line, just past Southall; a type of record cleaning cloth with a unique and inviting smell; Full Frequency Range Recording and Full Frequency Stereophonic Sound (not 'For Fuck's Sake, Stop', as was once claimed by a highly-respected mastering engineer friend of mine); and, finally, it wasn't a pound sign, it was an 'L' in old German script. |
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