Shellac and Swing!

‘Shellac and Swing!’ tells the story of the gramophone’s ‘golden age,’ from 1900-1955, when it helped to shape Britain’s culture from the arts to warfare. The story focuses on the gramophone, the invention of Emile Berliner in the 1880s, but begins with a brief outline of the first attempts to record the human voice and of Edison’s invention of the cylinder and the phonograph. It uses primary evidence, images and interviews with DJs, fans, musicians and historians to explore this fascinating and often eccentric tale. Each chapter ends with ‘On the Record,’ a discussion of a record that relates to the chapter’s themes. Although the gramophone and its fragile shellac discs were vital to Britain’s music scene—opera and music hall, the Jazz Age, the crooners, early rock’n’roll—its impact was far more extensive. Its place in British history encompasses advertising and design, fraud and piracy, phallic symbols, talking books, the threat from radio and TV, the contrasting worlds of the