What an eerily unpleasant Summer this is turning out to be in several respects.

Andrew Keeling mailed me just before he left for Slovenia last Wednesday noting another synchronicity - with his concentration on Jungian ideas he is very atuned to synchronicity phenomena. In this instance it is the mortality of man's best friend. While we were in St Ives and our dog was staying with a relative he was run over and killed and I had mentioned this to him. Andrew pointed to another three current examples in his circle of friends and relations. Like me he is puzzled at what on earth the "meaning" could be in this? Dog subtly create a dog-shaped bit of meaning in your life which you come to take for granted - from some points of view you might say that in this way they are able to model other aspects of how we are "fixed".

A couple of e-mails about Iain's book the People's Music lead to the conclusion that I have to read it now.

An envelope arrived from Cambridge telling James about his course, living arrangements etc. Earlier this week he went off to West London to stay with people he had got to know in Russia. In St Ives - where he managed to pick up the technique of Malibu surfing - he said to me that he thought that his current age was an especially good one. I could only agree.

I mailed Robin an article from The Guardian about an early and powerful example of muse relationships.

Here's the Guardian on The People's Music:

Ian MacDonald's erudite pop criticism, collected in The People's Music, always shines a new light on its subject Barney Hoskyns Sunday July 6, 2003 The Observer Buy The People's Music at Amazon.co.uk The People's Music by Ian MacDonald Pimlico �10.99, pp272

There are three broad kinds of British rock writers: the boring, the brash and the genuinely bright. It's typical of our anti-intellectual culture that the last group has come in for most abuse.

Yet just as Brian Eno refuses to dumb down the workings of his formidable dome, so the smartest British rock scribes - Simon Frith, David Toop, Biba Kopf, Jon Savage, Ian Penman and Simon Reynolds - choose to be true to their own grey matter. Like Eno himself, they make us think about music that hacks manage to reduce to mere distraction. Ian MacDonald is arguably the godfather of this erudite group.

A lengthy Eno interview, circa '74, is one of the MacDonald pieces I recall best from that golden age of rock journalism. NME's assistant editor between 1972 and 1975, Ian Mac eschewed the underground-outlaw stance of Nick Kent or Charles Shaar Murray but was at least their equal. He also wrote about intelligent artists - Eno, Kraftwerk, Todd Rundgren and co - rather than just glamorous or groovily outrageous ones.

The 29 comparatively recent pieces in The People's Music, his first publication since 1994's universally admired Beatles study, Revolution In The Head, are almost all dazzlingly insightful, as closely engaged and beautifully pared as the literary essays of James Wood in The Broken Estate or the entries in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Cinema. (When I first read 'Wild Mercury', a brilliant trawl through the life and work of Bob Dylan and the first selection here, I wondered why it wasn't being published in the New Yorker.) This is prose to make you pause, laying down the book as you gaze into the new space the writer's ideas have created.

MacDonald's re-evaluations of both pantheon artists (Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, Hendrix) and cult ones (Love, Chic, The Band, Steely Dan, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake) bracingly shake off received opinion and orthodoxy, obliging the reader to come at the music afresh. Randy Newman's 1968 debut album is his best, with a sense of 'irony so faint one could walk right by it, oblivious'. Steely Dan's oft-ignored Gaucho is 'a gem in the trash can of Californian entropy, a ray of coherent light amid LA's louche neon'. Bob Marley's songs are 'stranger in retrospect, more alien and sectarian than they've ever seemed before'. The music of Laura Nyro, who still lacks her rightful place in rock history, 'happens to be the most original, resourceful and powerful composed by any woman in the field of popular music over the last 50 years' - implicitly superior, in other words, to that of the more feted Joni Mitchell.

The People's Music is strewn with elegant descriptions, subtle clusters of epithets. The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds is 'a polyphonic palette of wide range-spaces and innovative voicings'. The Supremes' 'Stop! In The Name Of Love' mixes 'gentle sassitude, gospel passion and Streisand melodrama over an imperious high-stepping beat'. John Fahey's muse is 'melancholy, saturnine, remote and uncanny'. The music of the Minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass et al ) is 'unanimously flat, streamlined, kaleidoscopic and benignly impersonal'. Even when he's dismissing an act's work, MacDonald is inspired. He writes of the 'lazy provisionality' of Jefferson Airplane's 1969 album Volunteers.

The very best is saved for last, in the book's extraordinary title chapter, and in 'Exiled From Heaven', a moving and thoughtful homage to the doomed Nick Drake. The People's Music is one of the clearest, cleverest analyses of rock's evolution I've read, charting the Sixties shift from 'a corps of professionals' to 'a body of young amateurs', and taking us up to the present 'world of convenience and easy self-satisfaction', where 'the centre of gravity of social discourse has... shifted from middle age to youth'.

'Exiled From Heaven' is a long, bittersweet meditation on a singer whose gentle, haunted songs invite us 'to step out of this world of pose and noise' and 'suggest that what matters is the spirit in which we live' (my italics). Once more MacDonald overturns the tropes of rock nostalgia: Drake's final album, Pink Moon, usually seen as 'bleak, skeletal, nihilistic, ghoulish', is in fact 'an uncanny, magical record... a sparingly beautiful meditation.'

For MacDonald, Drake's songs - preoccupied with what nature is telling us about ourselves - underscore the mystery of life at a time when marketeers and biological reductionists alike seem bent on squeezing the magic out of existence. 'Can it be,' MacDonald writes in the book's magnificent final paragraph, 'that the materialist world view, in which there is no intrinsic meaning, is slowly murdering our souls?' It's not such a melodramatic conclusion.

MacDonald notes in his Beach Boys chapter that 'there are three sorts of sub-audience for pop: those with musical ears, those who concentrate on lyrics and those who like the "lifestyle" (attitudes, clothes, moves, atmosphere)... almost no one responds to all three equally.' He himself is a marvellous exception to that rule.