The Music Goes Round And Round

There are books about music that speak in reverent tones, invoking genius, legacy, and the ineffable power of art. And then there is The Music Goes Round and Round—a title that sounds less like a thesis and more like a mildly exasperated observation after the third repeat of a tune you didn’t particularly want to hear in the first place. Written by Peter Gammond and Raymond Horricks, two men who clearly knew their way around the musical world, this 1980 offering manages to occupy that curious middle ground between affection and gentle eye-rolling that only true enthusiasts can sustain.

Because that is the thing about music: it does, in fact, go round and round. Trends recycle, styles reappear wearing slightly different hats, and what was once dismissed as noise returns triumphantly as nostalgia. One suspects this book takes a quietly knowing pleasure in that endless loop—where yesterday’s novelty becomes today’s standard and tomorrow’s embarrassment, only to be rediscovered again in due course by someone declaring it “underrated.” If you have ever found yourself listening to something and thinking, “Haven’t we been here before?” then you are already in the right frame of mind.

Gammond and Horricks, both seasoned writers on music and culture, bring with them the reassuring sense that they have seen it all before—and possibly heard it twice. There is likely a parade of anecdotes, observations, and reflections that treat the musical world not as a sacred temple but as a lively, occasionally absurd ecosystem populated by performers, critics, enthusiasts and the faintly bewildered public. It is the sort of book that understands that for every moment of genuine brilliance, there are also curious detours, forgotten fashions, and songs that seemed like a very good idea at the time.

What makes a book like this quietly appealing is its ability to sit comfortably between celebration and satire. Music matters, undeniably, but it is also ridiculous, repetitive, commercial, inspired, derivative and endlessly self-renewing. To acknowledge all of that at once requires a certain lightness of touch, and this book appears to possess it in spades. You can almost hear the authors raising an eyebrow as they guide you through the cycles of taste, the rise and fall of genres, and the peculiar habit of the industry to rediscover its own past and call it innovation.

As a good copy sold by Crappy Old Books, this particular example comes with a detail that feels almost poetically appropriate: some fading to the spine area. A book about repetition and the passage of time bearing the visible marks of both is exactly as it should be. The spine, after all, is where everything holds together, and a little fading suggests it has spent some time doing its job—sitting on a shelf, being pulled out, perhaps consulted during a spirited discussion about whether something was better “back then,” whenever that might have been.

Published by Quartet Books in 1980, the volume arrives from that slightly sepia-toned era when music criticism had just enough distance from the present to be reflective, but not so much that it became overly academic. It feels like a product of a time when people still argued properly about music—face to face, possibly over drinks, and certainly with strong opinions about what counted as authentic, innovative, or simply tolerable.

In the end, The Music Goes Round and Round is exactly what it promises, and perhaps a little more. It is a book about the endlessly turning wheel of musical taste, written with the quiet assurance of people who know that nothing ever really disappears—it just waits for its next turn. A gently ironic, observant companion for anyone who has ever loved music, argued about it, or found themselves humming something they swore they would never listen to again. And like the best tunes, it may just linger longer than expected.

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