The great Dave Laing has died. He was a father figure of popular music studies. His book The Sound of Our Time was
published in 1969. It can be regarded as the first scholarly book about popular music written by an insider and fan. He was
one of the founding editors of Popular
Music, the first academic journal devoted to the subject. His 1985 book One Chord Wonders offered one of the
first, and still one of the best, scholarly analyses of punk rock. Dave was
also one of the most knowledgeable and perceptive writers about the music
industry. He was a person to turn to whether you wanted information about the
founding of this industry or if you wanted to assess the transformations of
today.
Yet Dave
achieved most of this outside of academia. He did not hold a university post
until 1996. Before that he was a freelance author, journalist and lecturer.
Between 1972 and 1984 he contributed to Time
Out, Sounds, Let It Rock, the Radio
One History of Pop and many more besides. In 1984 he assumed a post as
Research and Press Officer for the International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI). From 1987 to 1996 he worked as an editor for the music
industry journals Music Week, Music
Business International and Financial
Times Music & Copyright.
The popular
music studies community is devastated by his passing, with numerous emotional
tributes appearing on email threads over the last day or so. We are all saying
the same thing. He had a unique knowledge of popular music, he was exceptionally generous
with this knowledge, and he was phenomenally good company. I always made a beeline for
him at conferences, relishing his incisive intellect and wit.
I first got
to know Dave ten years ago when he was one of the examiners for my PhD thesis.
He was rigorous, picking me up on what other examiners might pass by (I was
reprimanded for detailing the wrong year for Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, listing
the date of the German language publication rather than the translation I
had used). He also improved the work tremendously. The structural changes he recommended helped me turn the thesis into Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record. Subsequently, Dave worked with me on the first PhD I supervised. Over the past two
years we have been co-editing a book together. I knew that he was ill, but he
had kept from me just how serious things have been.
To say that
Dave will be missed is an understatement. He is irreplaceable. His passing has
taken me back to Laurie Anderson’s ‘World Without End’, which has one of the
most devastating lyrics in all of popular music:
When my
father died we put him in the ground
When my
father died it was like a whole library had burned down
