Keir Starmer is on a personal mission to promote music to the under-11s. From rock’n’roll to Jonathan Richman, our writers suggest songs for an alternative schooling
Rock’n’roll is nearly 70 years old: it can just sound arcane and distant to ears trained on 21st-century pop. An effective crash course in its revolutionary importance, how it changed Britain forever requires not one track, but two. First, play something that constituted pop music before Little Richard et al arrived: Dickie Valentine’s The Finger of Suspicion, Anne Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms or Guy Mitchell’s frankly horrifying paean to fatherhood, Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po). Then play Long Tall Sally, the feral opening seconds of which – in the context of what came before – sound like a bomb going off, or the world being turned on its head. Alexis Petridis
