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Clip of the Week

Doves celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2025 with a new album, a new compilation and a tour. A quarter of a century of epic landscapes and introspection, pounding beats and soul-searching questions. Twenty-five years is a huge achievement but they feel like they’ve been around longer and in a sense they have; Sub Sub with the same line-up through the 90s preceded Doves by seven years and a few hits. Doves feel like they have grown out of Britpop – in both senses of that phrase. A studio fire forced a re-set and a reinvention as a guitar band but they didn’t sound like those who went before (say, Oasis) or those who came after like the Arctic Monkeys… (READ ON)

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This Week’s Book Choice

Pop music has always been queer. If you don’t think so, you haven’t been listening. Jon Savage’s “The Secret Public: A Queer History Of Pop” (Faber & Faber, 2025) shows how LGBTQ artists and audiences reshaped music from the inside out. The book is a masterclass in writing about music, with its blend of scholarly rigour and raw enthusiasm pulling the reader into stories of queer creativity that pulse with life. Across more than 700 pages, Savage reframes pop history entirely.

Spanning 1955 to 1979, the book traces the emergence of queer visibility in an era when both legal and cultural forces sought to suppress it. Savage reveals how what became mainstream pop – its sounds, styles, and even its scandals – was profoundly shaped by LGBTQ pioneers. Little Richard’s ecstatic performances, Dusty Springfield’s vocal vulnerability, Lou Reed’s cryptic storytelling, and Sylvester’s unapologetic disco mark points on a continuum of queer influence stretching from the underground to the heart of popular culture.

But Savage doesn’t just present the reader with an expertly researched archive. He writes with the urgency of someone who wants us to hear the pulse of queer creativity in every riff, lyric, and gesture. He evokes the thrill of Bowie’s shapeshifting, the shockwaves of disco liberation, and the coded defiance in songs that offered lifelines to those who recognised themselves within them.

Being about pop, the book inevitably brushes against our own cultural memories. In 1977, an unknown Tom Robinson used to play at the Stapleton Tavern, just down the road from our North London squat. There were maybe a dozen of us in the audience each time, and – straight or gay – we’d all sing along to Glad To Be Gay. A year later, I was with the 100,000 people singing the same song when he headlined the Anti-Nazi League Carnival at Victoria Park.

As Savage shows, queerness drove not only self-expression but also cultural solidarity and social change. “The Secret Public” is both a vital contribution to music history and a celebration of pop’s power to imagine freedom, often in the face of severe adversity. As Savage concludes: “It’s an inspiring story, but a cautionary one, as these battles will have to be fought all over again.”

Mike Press

Read all our previous book reviews here.