Christmas 2013: best pop books of the year The big hook of Mark Lewisohn's biography of the Beatles, All These Years, Volume 1: Tune In (Little, Brown T £26), is that it is 900 pages long and ends in Christmas 1962 as the Beatles" first single climbs the charts, with a further two volumes to come. Pop music is all about the new and the surprising but I doubt anyone expected to be surprised by the Beatles again. As it turns out, the story only needed supersizing. I approached the book as a sceptic but continued reading with bewildered pleasure. It is like viewing an entire museum from a distance of a couple of inches; you see nothing but detail piled upon detail. The last few hundred pages are a near real-time description of how that first single, Love Me Do, came in to being ... and each step was an accident. The Beatles created the template of the pop group, a gang of boys who write and perform their own songs. Yet if they had released a cover of a US doo-wop hit, as the Hollies did a few months later using the same team in the same Abbey Road studios, would the story of pop have been different? Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley (Faber, T £18) is another standout book of the year, a history of pop from the invention of the 7" single. The Beatles are central to his story too, yet Stanley points out they never understood their own specialness. Why would they? They were only one bunch of Northern working-class kids among a great many others. Lewisohn has said he wanted to write their story without relying on "hindsight cleverness" yet in one respect he breaks his rule, often describing the Beatles by the yet-to-be-invented term "rock band." The Beatles name puns on the idea of the literary "beats" - it is this allusion that makes them a "beat" band. At the same time, London bands were beginning to use the term "rhythm and blues" which, as Stanley notes, was the new, cosy name for the old Billboard "race music" chart: "r&b" was music played by African-Americans, as simple as that. The Beatles and the other beat bands had a style, but it was the effect they had on their audience that was key to pop's explosion. The Liverpool fans called themselves "Cavernites" and their counterparts in Manchester identified just as closely with the Oasis and the Twisted Wheel. Almost all of them were very young girls. The boys, Nash claims, only appeared at the end of the night to punch the musicians for getting too fresh with their girlfriends. On the surface, the progression from beat bands to rock groups reflects a new depth and ambition. The actual effect, however, was to squeeze out the female audience. A similar process happened with reggae in the Seventies, as described by Lloyd Bradley in Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (Serpent's Tail, T £11.99). The producer Dennis Bovell describes how the music grew darker and more oppressive, saying, "What woman wants to spend two hours in front of a mirror getting ready to go and then stand in a dark sweaty basement?" Bovell's solution was lover's rock, a style that combined disco and reggae and brought women back to the clubs. Janet Kay's Silly Games is the masterpiece of a London-born genre that, once exported to Jamaica, gave new life to singers like the great Gregory Isaacs. Bradley's history takes us through Jazz Age dance bands, Calypsonians, blues parties and Eddy Grant's Equals, the one beat band with actual black members. But with lover's rock London was transformed, no longer a place where versions of black music were played, but a city that generates new music of its own - anticipating the jungle, dubstep and grime stars of today. As black-music fans were discovering lover's rock, young Northerners were heading to Wigan Casino to dance to old soul records. Northern Soul: an Illustrated History by Elaine Constantine and Gareth Sweeney (Virgin, T £18) documents a movement whose origins also lies in the Sixties beat clubs. These venues had no alcohol licences and so nothing prevented them opening all day, as the Cavern did, or all night, which was the speciality of the Twisted Wheel, setting the template for Wigan's famous all-nighters. This year also saw the publication of Autobiography by Morrissey (Penguin Classics, T £8.99) which begins with the singer alone and friendless in Manchester and ends with him alone and friendless at an international level. Imagine Oscar Wilde with a mouthful of marbles and you will get some idea of its camp, slightly garbled, pompous tone. The Smiths are heirs to the Northern beat bands, emerging in an era that was closer to the Sixties than the present-day. Morrissey even compares the Smiths to the Hollies, noting that before Meat is Murder, the last studio album from a Manchester band to reach number one was the Hollies" 1968 Greatest Hits. The Smiths once seemed as classy and retro as Levis 501s, and have aged just as badly Morrissey. Picture: Andy Fellon A list of Eighties artists that have weathered the years might include the Pixies, Throwing Muses and the Cocteau Twins (three bands that prove that it is women who make the most interesting rock stars). These artists all emerged on the independent label 4AD whose story is documented by Martin Aston in the 600-page Facing the Other Way (Friday Project, T £23). The hero is label boss Ivo Watts-Russell, just as the hero of All These Years is the Beatles" manager Brian Epstein. As Morrissey should know, sometimes it's the quiet ones.