It was written in the second Summer of Love in 1988 and it’s technically out of date – but that doesn’t matter because Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s book “The MANUAL – How to Have a Number One the Easy Way” is a great read and a lot of the principals of having a number one single are still relevant today.

The book also foretells its own imminent irrelevance, The Timelords admitting that they are writing “a book that will be completely redundant within twelve months. An obsolete artifact. Its only use being a bit of a social history that records the aspirations of a certain strata in British society in the late eighties…”

The Austrian Eurotrash band Edelweiss took the book as a primary influence: they read the book, borrowed ABBA’s “S.O.S.”, and sold five million copies worldwide with “Bring Me Edelweiss”. It also proved to be an influence on 2000s British girl group The Pipettes who formed after reading the book in order to explore “the idea of being a pop machine.”

In the liner photographs of the Chumbawamba album Readymades, Boff Whalley is seen to be reading a copy of The Manual. It is a reference to Chumbawamba’s earlier success with their hit single, “Tubthumping”.

Jamie Reynolds of The Klaxons admitted in an interview to reading The Manual and stated that he “took direct instructions from it…. Get yourself a studio, get a groove going, sing some absolute nonsense over the top, put a breakbeat behind it, and you’re away! That’s what I did! That’s genuinely it. I read that, I noted down the golden rules of pop, and applied that to what we’re doing and made sure that that always applies to everything we do. That way, we always come out with a sort of catchy hit number.”

Have your own Number One and get a copy to cherish from Amazon today.

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