Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart - Book Of Pop

[dem bones]

Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart - Book Of Pop (Piccolo, 1973)

Introduction

Slade
Lynsey de Paul
The Osmonds
David Bowie
The New Seekers
The Jackson Five
Elvis Presley
The Radio One Disc Jockeys
Olivia Newton-John
Marc Bolan
Elton John
David Cassidy
Rod Stewart and the Faces
Gilbert O'Sullivan
Rolling Stones

Blurb:

MORNINGGG!!!
Stewpot's pick of the pops - all your favourite pop personalities picked by one of your favourite DJs - lots of facts, figures, quotes and anecdotes that you might not have heard before about your fave raves .. .
Happy reading ...!

"Let's break off from the pop scene and take a look at the BBC's DJ's ... Alan Freeman .... was given a straight acting roll in Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors and got involved with creeping vines that strangled people. Cracks Freeman: 'Many people thought I made a very good creep, indeed!'

That's a typical freeman remark; he's one of the most professional disc jockeys on radio - and yet he's never likely to be big-headed."

Day 154 of the Whitechapel pulp horror famine and by now i'm so desperate for a fix that a mere fleeting reference to an Amicus classic is enough to make me part with £2 at my friend Mark Defoe's consistently surprising stall in Spitalfields Market (Sundays only). Sadly, the Brentford Nylons flogger's hilarious funny is the highlight of what is a supremely dull hundred or so pages.

If i tell you that the second most "interesting" tit-bit occurs on the 'about the author' page at the front - "Ed Stewart got the nickname 'Stewpot' from his otherwise unusable talent of rolling his stomach muscles to resemble a cooking utensil" - that should give you some idea of how gloriously boring 'Stewpot's anecdotes truly are. He doesn't even get Lyndsey de Paul, the most haunted pop star in Highgate, to talk about all the ghosts she's met for crying out loud! The chapter devoted to The Radio One Disc Jockeys is particularly grim as it reminds us that "that looney-humorist Noel Edmonds" is still abroad but, thankful for small mercies, at least the risible "Hairy Monster" is dispensed with in a single sentence as one of "the rest of the million pounds worth of talented tonsils - Dave Lee Travis, Michael Aspel, John Dunn, David Hamilton and the others - each of whom deserves a book to himself, let alone a chapter."

Not a patch on Tony Blackburn's splendid A Laugh In Any Pocket, of that you can be sure.