Pop music’s a simple pleasure. Is it catchy? Can you dance to it? Do you fancy the singer?

What’s fascinating about pop is our relationship with it. This relationship gets more complicated the longer it goes on. It’s been going on now for 50 years.

David Hepworth is interested in the human side of pop. He’s interested in how people make the stuff and, more importantly, what it means to us.

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, he shows how it is possible to take music seriously and, at the same time, not drain the life out of it. From the legacy of the Beatles to the dramatic decline of the record shop, from top tips for bands starting out to the bewildering nomenclature of musical genres, with characteristic insight and humour, he explores the highways and byways of this vast multiverse where Nothing Is Real and yet it is, emphatically and intrinsically so. Along the way he asks some essential questions about music and about life: is it all about the drummer; are band managers misunderstood; and is it appropriate to play ‘Angels’ at funerals?

As Pope John Paul II said ‘of all the unimportant things, football is the most important’. David Hepworth believes the same to be true of music and this selection of his best writing, covering the music of last fifty years, shows you precisely why.