"There is something faintly off-putting about this book’s subtitle. We live in a world where the obsession with music’s past threatens to overwhelm its present, where the only music magazines that sell in any quantity deal in heritage rock, where virtually the only TV coverage of music comes via retrospective documentaries: the story of modern pop has been told and retold until it’s been reduced to a series of tired anecdotes and over-familiar landmarks. But Yeah Yeah Yeah’s brilliance lies in the personal, idiosyncratic route Bob Stanley takes through the past: for him, the modern pop era begins not with Elvis or “Rock Around the Clock”, but the release of Johnnie Ray’s 1954 album Live at the London Palladium, the first time a screaming teenage audience had been heard on record in the UK. He devotes more space to 1970 one-hit wonders Edison Lighthouse than to Led Zeppelin, delivers a withering verdict on some surprising sacred cows – Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Steely Dan – and is great at unearthing a forgotten quote that challenges what you might call the authorised version of events: at the height of the 1967’s Summer of Love, he finds the Who’s Pete Townshend not boggling at the new frontiers mapped out by psychedelia, but grumpily complaining that “people aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’”. Stanley has a way of tackling well-worn topics – not least the Beatles – from unlikely angles, and of talking about artists you’ve never heard of with a contagious enthusiasm that makes hearing them seem like a matter of urgency. Best of all, he makes you laugh out loud while getting directly to the heart of the matter. The lugubrious late 70s output of Pink Floyd sounds like music made by people “who hated being themselves”. The punk-era Elvis Costello sang “like he was standing in a fridge”, and the experience of listening to novelty ska revivalists Bad Manners is “like being on a waltzer when you’ve had three pints and desperately need the toilet”. If you’ve ever heard them, you’ll know exactly what he means."

"She's one of my all-time favourite artists, all-time favourite spirits and one of my all-time favourite voices. I think she's incredibly fragile and I continue to worry for her because I don't think she's being very well taken care of as an artist. There's certain artists need everybody's help to continue to be creative and she's one of them. 

 I'm a tank – I can take care of myself and I don't need anybody's help, but Sinéad O'Connor is a jewel and has a voice like no other – one of the great voices of this century. I worry that we're going to lose her. She has mental health problems and has spoken very openly about them and is really brave and courageous for doing so. She's a great rebellious spirit who was punished for being a rebel in ways that we can barely imagine or conceive of. I have nothing but great admiration for her. 

 She has this extraordinary voice that just does things to my insides. She's a complete iconic gem and touches me in ways that so few can; she's made so many beautiful records. I wish I could sort of throw myself at her feet, because I feel like she finds love, I think, difficult to absorb, and yet she's so deserving of it. This voice comes, again, from a different universe. Its spectacular ability to both emote and communicate. I'm so grateful to her for this record; I just love it and I love hearing her sing so much. She's one of my touchstones, someone I always can rely on to bring magic. 
 When greats die, like when David Bowie died, there's this great outpouring of grief as I know there will be if and when, god forbid, we lose, finally, an artist like Sinéad O'Connor. Yet she's alive now and is capable of producing these spectacular pieces of work, and yet she's treated so brutally by the music industry – an industry who would rather laude in applause an uncreative, stage-schooled kid who's got a great voice but no soul. They'll get more excited about that than they will the possibility of signing a great like Sinéad O'Connor. And therein lies the ludicrousness of the modern music business."

"Grasshopper gave me Lady in Satin for my 30th birthday. People were startled by the quality of Billie’s voice on this, her final album before she died, you can hear the years of her life in her voice. As a singer you’re always doing everything you can to imagine your voice being clear, non-crackly and not having any cobwebs, you’re doing everything you can to sing perfectly. “Yet here was someone singing imperfectly, but with all the vulnerability of a life well and certainly intensely lived. That changed everything for me, hearing the crackle in her voice, the years making their way out of her windpipe, almost by clawing their way out. “I’d read that Ray Ellis, who conducted and produced the album, cried when she first sang these songs, because he knew her as someone whose voice had a very full, rich-sounding tonal quality. Yet on this album you can hear the cobwebs, the lisping gasps of air between words. He cried because he thought this shouldn’t be Billie Holiday on record. It was only later that he thought it was her masterpiece. “It was the first time I began to see the connection between the singer, their voice and the listener, that it had nothing to do with the pureness of tone, being perfectly in tune or singing as loud as could be. It was all about the emotions that came out via the breath and the notes together that made the connection. “It changed everything, not only about my singing, but the way I began to understand what people appreciated in a singers’ voice. I could really understand and take some of the pressure off trying to be what I thought was a perfect singer, I know I’m not, but you always have it in mind that you’ve to belt it out and sing perfectly. “I finally began to accept that what comes out of me is my voice and no one else’s, this song and the album as a whole finally released that anxiety in me. The next record we made was Deserter’s Songs.”"