Congratulations are due to Ben Thompson, for producing Ways of Hearing, a book that must rank as one of the most imaginative and admirable additions to pop's literary canon in recent years. Books on popular music traditionally fall into easily identifiable categories, from the picture-book "Our Story" tomes so crucial to the marketing of this week's perfect pop fodder, to the rushed, newspaper-cutting compilation rags which represent the literary reward for any band that manages to successfully negotiate that "difficult" second album. Disappointingly, music books that begin by quoting RD Laing's pioneering analysis of schizophrenic mental disturbance, The Divided Self, and end with a top 20 of songs featuring "great whistling" are somewhat less common. However Ways of Hearing manages all of this and much more.

Thompson's book seeks to investigate the "pop psyche", the power of popular music to "transform" both those who make it and those who listen to it. This investigation is split into three main sections, beginning with a consideration of some of the means in which we tap into the pop psyche (through the varying media of television, radio and film), moving on to the author's absorbing and often highly amusing biographies of both pop's main and peripheral figures, before concluding with five essays which draw together the many imaginative threads explored, in a largely successful attempt to broaden our understanding of how "music helps us to define ourselves, both inside our heads and out in the cruel world".

Throughout, Thompson's constant stream of ideas and concepts, frequently supported by amusing, opinionated comment, provide countless sterling examples of the enthusiasm and sheer imagination so often lacking in pop writing. For example, where else could one find a consideration of Paul Weller's solo career using the regions of the East Midlands as its main reference points? ("While Wild Wood suggests Nottingham in its engaging liveliness, his Heliocentric album was, sadly, getting dangerously close to Loughborough"). In all, this book, in its comprehensive confirmation of the age-old maxim that "pop music is an argument that anyone can join in", can be fully recommended to anyone with so much as a passing interest in the world of pop. --Steve Price

John Berger's Ways of Seeing was first published in 1972. It looked at visual images and how they shape us. In Ways of Hearing Ben Thompson does a similar thing for music - albeit in a non-sociological, highly subjective, fairly irreverent and extremely entertaining manner. He explores the role of music in the mediums of radio, TV, film, literature and video, and interviews a wildly disparate bunch of musicians and djs, from Brian Eno, John Peel, Captain Beefheart and Neil Young, to Lee Perry, Sir Cliff Richard, the Chemical Brothers and Mercury Rev. 'As a public airing of private pleasures delivered with a distinctive critical voice, it's consistently engaging and infectiously readable' Julian Cowley, The Wire

2002-01-13 More dispatches from the best music writer around

Ben Thompson does it again. Not content with penning the wondrous 'Seven Years of Plenty', he's back with more incisive criticism & pithy one-liners than you can shake a very big stick at. Who else do you know who would juxtapose interviews with Sir Cliff Richard and Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubauten ? Nuff said.