The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups put Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving into the competition between performers and the recording industry for control over the music. He interviews musicians, songwriters, music directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the best-known performers of the era. Drawing his interpretation of the processes at work during this musical revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process.
Gordon Thompson grew up in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where he first learned to read and to perform music in the church choir; however, when a rock 'n' roll band began practicing a few doors down and especially after the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, he found a new calling. He was fourteen. Borrowing money from a friend and his parents to obtain a drum kit, he began imitating what he heard on the radio, playing with bands, and teaching himself the basics of music theory and harmony. By the time he graduated from the School of Music at the University of Windsor, he had played almost every kind of music his industrial hometown had to offer: rock, blues, jazz, country, pop, polkas, Celtic...; he had even provided rim-shots for a comedian and backbeats for a stripper.
He earned his music degree in theory and composition; however, he had also begun to learn about North Indian classical music, studying the sitar and tabla, and analyzing musical performances with Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy. After graduating and studying in India in 1974, he earned his Masters of Music at the University of Illinois under Bruno Nettl (with a thesis about the history of the song "Georgia on My Mind"), before continuing on to UCLA where he rejoined Jairazbhoy to complete a dissertation on patronage and the classical and folk musics of Gujarat.
He taught at the Long Beach and Fullerton campuses of California State University before joining the Music Department at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York in 1988. At Skidmore, he has chaired the Department of Music, directed the Asian Studies program, and overseen study-abroad programs in India and London. When invited to teach in London, he developed a course for American students introducing them to sixties British rock and pop. That project led him to begin applying approaches he had learned as an ethnomusicologist working in India to this era when the British "invaded" the North American market. He began interviewing musicians, songwriters, producers, music directors, and engineers active in London during the sixties, compiling the basis for a musical ethnography of that scene and that resulted in Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out (Oxford 2008).
He continues to teach classes at Skidmore College on sixties British pop, the Beatles, Indian music, and film music and organizes a popular annual concert by students and faculty of the music of the Beatles. He is currently writing a book on the Beatles' core repertoire.
