For more than a decade, Derek Philpott and his son, Dave, have been writing to pop stars from the 1960s to the 90s to take issue with the lyrics of some of their best-known songs.

But then, to their great surprise, the pop stars started writing back…

Dear Mr Pop Star contains 100 of Derek and Dave’s greatest hits, including correspondence with Katrina and the Waves, Tears for Fears, Squeeze, The Housemartins, Suzi Quatro, Devo, Deep Purple, Nik Kershaw, T Pau, Human League, Eurythmics, Wang Chung, EMF, Mott the Hoople, Heaven 17, Jesus Jones, Johnny Hates Jazz, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Chesney Hawkes and many, many more.

I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the authors in exchange for an honest review.

Having read a lot of novels lately, the opportunity to read something easy to pick up and put down whenever a few minutes presented themselves to me was really appealing. And this collection of hilarious missives between the Messers Philpott and their pop music victims provided the perfect opportunity for this. A tome of around 100 letters and responses from a host of global music stars, Dear Mr Pop Star is the ideal choice for an easy reading light-hearted book.

The letters range from the amusing to the amusingly absurd, but always questioning the lyrics of some of the most popular songs spanning the better part of three decades. In some of the scribblings the Philpott’s question the songs, dissecting chorus and verse for hidden meaning. In others, our intrepid music fans intentionally apply wrong meaning to songs to fantastic comedic effect. In other cases the authors have let their imaginations run completely wild amusing (or maybe infuriating) the artists. In all cases, the net result is some amusing correspondence between all parties.

There are a number of postcard thoughts aimed at other artists which in their own right make for entertaining interludes between the more substantial letters and their responses. While some of the to and fro was less entertaining to me, this is most likely down to my own ignorance of the artists in question and their respective bodies of work. With that said, this mirthful book contains plenty enough artists that I think almost any reader would be hard pressed not to find entertaining communique between the authors and musicians they are familiar with. To have had an opportunity to enjoy a light read that can be picked up for just a few moments at a time and find hilarity with in the majority of the pages is something I don’t often get given my usual leaning to a dark novel made this a most welcome and funny diversion!

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