Mama Weer All Crazee Now

If academics who study popular culture feel bound to emphasise their work's serious pretensions by focusing only on the avant garde, then Alan Moore, head of music and sound recording at Surrey University, deserves applause if not an encore. For Professor Moore, who has written books and papers on rock, pop, blues and gospel music, argues that there are "very interesting questions to ask of the rather more run-of-the-mill".

By such criteria, his latest project, an in-depth study of the music of Seventies glam rockers Slade, is bound to be profound.