Toppermost - Music site with a difference

Clip of the Week

Savages were a post punk band from South London formed in 2011. In my humble opinion, the combination of Jehnny Beth on vocals, Gemma Thompson on guitar, Ayse Hassan on bass, and Fay Milton on drums was one of the best combinations of noise makers to occur in the same place at the same time. They are one of the best bands ever to be committed to wax, seared onto disc, or encoded into zeroes and ones.… (READ ON)

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This Week’s Book Choice

“Everything We Do Is Music: How 20th Century Classical Music Shaped Pop” by Elizabeth Alker (Faber & Faber, 2025).

“This fantastic book has taken me absolutely ages to get through. Not because it’s boring, or full of leaden prose, it’s because I have to keep breaking off reading to go and investigate the music that she’s so infectiously enthusiastic about. It sounds a little bit hyperbolic but I think it’s a book that could definitely alter the way you listen to and appreciate music.” Andy Mackenzie

The worlds of pop and rock owe a much greater debt to the classical canon than we realise. A direct and fascinating lineage draws from the experimentalism of Pierre Henry to The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, from Stockhausen to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and from Bruckner to Sonic Youth via Glenn Branca.

In “Everything We Do Is Music”, Elizabeth Alker shines a light on the fertile ground that exists between the borders of classical music and pop.

Read all our previous book reviews here.

Toppermost Recommends

London’s The Hanging Stars return with their sixth album, Just A Day – a dazzling collection of four-part harmonies, shimmering twelve-string guitars and chiming songs, touching on themes of longing, new beginnings and the fragility of the everyday. Recorded at Edwyn Collins’ legendary Clashnarrow Studios in the Scottish Highlands, the album marks a bold new chapter for the band, produced with the invaluable guidance of Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love.

“An exhilarating album of cascading riffs and rhythms, harmonies and hooks that are very much rooted in the present while paying respect to the influences that inform this innovative and gifted band.” Americana UK