The post  below is a recommendation of In The City – A Celebration of London Music, the new book by Paul Du Noyer, which I’ve just finished reading. In addition to his writing for NME, Q and MOJO he wrote Liverpool – Wondrous Place and has now produced this excellent celebration of the popular music of London.

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In the City lays out its celebration of London music across the city’s history from the pre-Beatles era – stretching as far back as the Middle Ages – through Britpop to Roots Manuva and Kate Nash. Through this simple approach Paul Du Noyer delivers the book’s most impressive achievement, a lasting impression of London, expressed through its popular music. Without overstating his case he manages to connect up his disparate subject. In the process he gives a vivid sense of how London has thrived on its ability to change and remain open.

(There are one or two weaknesses. If there is a place for Sigue Sigue Sputnik or Haysi Fantazee there is room for Saint Etienne, strangely absent).

The key to what Du Noyer has to say is his assertion that “everything in the city is a balance of alterations and secret continuity.” It is this fact that allows Du Noyer to make his connections between the centuries and the many strands of London music. It also contains the essential truth of the city. Transience and permanence, as Madness have it in the title track of their newest album, the Liberty of Norbert Folgate:

“The perpetual steady echo of the passing beat/A continual dark river of people/In its transience and in its permanence.” And, again: “Whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets/Or Banglatown/We’re all dancing in the moonlight, we’re all/On borrowed ground.”

Ian Dury may “give voice to Essex’s plebeian tribes” but he often did it through a “stroppy funk” sound.  Grime may involve hip hop and dancehall but also some “old-fashioned cockney cheek.” If this oversimplifies what Du Noyer is saying, it is not intended to. His success is not to impose a scheme on this music, but still to give his subject coherence.

Some may balk at four chapters on music before the Beatles arrive in London but do not be deterred. Du Noyer uses these chapters to ground the book’s tales of jazz, swinging London, mod, blues, glam, punk, grime and Britpop. Examples of London’s long tradition of festivals and unruly street culture are given their due, such as with the 12th Century Augustinian friar Brother Rahere, who established his three-day Smithfield fair in 1133. Later mutating over hundreds of years as the annual Bartholomew’s Fair, it was eventually suppressed in the 19th Century, and was denounced by Wordsworth as “A hell/For eyes and ears!/What anarchy and din/barbarian and infernal…” It’s not hard to hear the echo of Wordsworth’s complaint in the way the Notting Hill Carnival or the explosion of punk in 1976 and 1977 were greeted, by some at least. (Du Noyer comments that the Sex Pistols looked so treasonous precisely because they seemed to come from the soul of London itself).

Du Noyer introduces the tradition of street balladeers and their “broadsides” and “broadsheets” of printed lyrics of satire, ribaldry and social comment, works his way through costermonger culture and music hall acts like Harry Champion and Marie Lloyd, but also to Ivor Novello and Noel Coward. Here too we can find Frank Sinatra staying at the Savoy, Lord Kitchener fresh from the Windrush, Chris Barber and Ronnie Scott in their clubs, and Tommy Steele at the Palladium. Du Noyer is generous to his subjects and refuses to neglect the period before the early 1960s.

He writes intelligently about Mod – “a very London cult” – and the divergence between the first mods and the “newcomer mods” who swelled their numbers but diluted the aesthetic. He finds the mod attitude in the aspirations of later working class London youth, even among those whose fans at the time would not have recognised it. Of Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp he says he absorbed “an old London tradition – the way of the dandy apprentice.”

Du Noyer writes of medieval London: “London could not be mellow if it hoped to flourish.” This could be said of any other point in its history as well.  Du Noyer’s starting point is to describe both the experiences of those already living in the cacophony of the city and those who have just arrived – how they tell their stories and where they influence each other. Multiculturalism may now be perpetually under attack from politicians, commentators and the far right, even though a multicultural society is a fact of life. But true to its view of London’s alterations and continuity Du Noyer’s book subtly demolishes the idea that London could have been a successful city by shutting itself off from the rest of the world, even as he simultaneously describes the evolution of London musical traditions stretching back hundreds of years. “The music of any immigrant community works two ways – enriching the adopted country while also being shaped by it, absorbing its particular essence,” argues Du Noyer.

Time and again many of the most talented people in Britain and the rest of the world find their way to London. You can see it on Brook Street, where the blue plaques to Jimi Hendrix and George Frideric Handel sit next door to each other as unexpected neighbours.

London has risen to its great heights through its openness to the world. The stages of the evolution of the city’s music detailed here repudiate a closed and parochial view. We are reminded of the influence of calypso in the modern rhyming styles of artists such as Lily Allen. A performer as London to the bone as Bud Flanagan was born Reuben Weintrop in a Polish-Jewish household. London’s cultural hybrid is so at odds with an inward view of the world that even the “Lambeth Walk” – written by Noel Gay, who had also written the Flanagan favourite “Run Rabbit Run” – was described in the Third Reich as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”.  Du Noyer shows how for many young survivors of the London Blitz only the “frantic noise” of an African-American music – jazz – could express their feelings as the terror of war switched over to the new exhilaration of peace-time.

In the response of The Clash to everything around them there are great London songs – Du Noyer brilliantly captures “London Calling” as being like a William Blake vision, the “city as celestial battleground” – but also a rejection of petty narrowness.

“We weren’t parochial,” says Joe Strummer, “we weren’t narrow-minded, we weren’t Little Englanders. At least we had the suss to embrace what we were presented with, which was the world in all its weird variety.”

The Clash’s embrace of the world in all that variety made them anti-racists and joined them up to the heart of what makes London work. Anti-racism is not a luxury for London. Du Noyer points to Nitin Sawhney, whose last album London Undersound responds to the 7 July terror attacks. Sawhney says: “Growing up in Rochester in the hey-day of the National Front, I was the only Asian in my whole area. I’d get an NF van following me back from school, shouting ‘Paki’. I liked to get away to London because it seemed more accepting.” For Sawhney, music is a repudiation of racism. “You can’t bullshit with music, it cuts across barriers; it’s automatically multicultural.”

Sawhney’s experience of looking beyond his home environment to London resonates in other ways, touching on one of London’s great sources of musical inspiration. To many young people in outer-London boroughs and the network of satellite towns that encircle London, the excitement of the just-out-of-reach centre makes it the place to escape to.  The clamour and din described in the book hold sway. This process has produced some of the sharpest and most innovative British music but also new perspectives on London. Du Noyer carefully carefully builds in this point, drawing out how outer London and suburban figures from Siouxsie Sioux to David Bowie “represented extraordinary acts of personal reinvention” and in many cases shaped not only London’s music but had a far-reaching impact.

Brett Anderson of Suede describes the sense of the need to escape Haywards Heath. “As a kid, walking past the station you knew that each train was going up to London and you’d think, I wish I was on that.” To Paul Weller, in Woking, “London was where it was really happening.” From further afield, The Smiths’ “London” encapsulates the excitement of the new arrival at Euston, noting the jealousy of those left behind. The promise of London provides inspiration and in the process renews London’s sense of itself.

A Londoner by birth rather than by arrival, Ray Davies of the Kinks hangs over many aspects of this story, a common link to a wide and disparate group of artists. Du Noyer is especially good on Davies’s separation from the in-crowd and in his stories of unrecorded lives. “Even in the so-called groovy sixties I was writing songs about my neighbourhood. That’s possibly why I seemed detached from the other things going on.” Davies describes Waterloo Sunset as the band’s statement, and he is right. But in its beautiful description of the bustling city I find it impossible to ignore the tinge of Davies’s detachment. The narrator looks from his window and gazes on the city and the sunset – observing not participating. The sheer sweep of the song and its cast of millions of Londoners may overcome that detachment but not without melancholy.

Du Noyer too is concerned with how music flows from the relationship of each Londoner to the city:

“London music is a projection of the self against a constantly shifting canvas of other people’s bodies. We thread our separate lives through the city’s collective fabric. Commerce, satire, the companionship of the pub, the news of the day…these are recurring themes we find in a city that can drive people deep into themselves, but never lets them forget its existence. Loneliness seems part of parcel of London life, but every song is an act of reaching out.”

In the City might as easily be subtitled a celebration of London and its music. Through London’s popular music it provides a clear and vivid account of London itself and how it feels; and how it changes in order to remain.

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In The City, by Paul Du Noyer. Virgin Books. £18.99 hardback.