Photo: Getty / Mark Sullivan
Nicky Hopkins and the Making of
Modern Rock: Book in Progress
by Alissa Ordabai
Nicky Hopkins was the virtuoso pianist behind some of the most enduring music of the twentieth century. His playing gave shape and weight to the Rolling Stones’ most ambitious records; it carried the Kinks into myth; it lent pathos to John Lennon, fire to the Who, and astonishing fluidity to Jefferson Airplane. His playing could be sharp-edged or transcendent, but always carried a clarity and intelligence that set it apart.
His musical vocabulary stretched from barrelhouse blues to Rachmaninoff and he was a transformative cultural figure — the link between classical music and counterculture, one of the defining musical minds of the 1960s and the 1970s, the hinge between the two epochs.
And yet Hopkins remains largely uncredited in the cultural record — not just overlooked, but systematically excluded. His name is rarely mentioned in documentaries, box sets, or official band histories.
What does this kind of erasure say about authorship, memory, and value in modern culture?
I began writing my book about Hopkins because these questions matter beyond music. His story is not only about the misallocation of credit in an industry; it is about how societies define cultural capital, how they reward visibility over substance, and how they fail to remember those who contributed most.
In a world where recognition often follows narrative convenience, Hopkins is an inconvenient figure — too brilliant to ignore, too unaffiliated to commodify.
These five chapters, taken from my book-in-progress, begin the work of restoring him to the historical and cultural frame. Each one explores a different moment of Hopkins’ work and world — fragments of a larger story that is at once musical, cultural, and sometimes even political.
Audio Versions
Several of these chapters, along with selected excerpts, have been recorded in audio form and published on YouTube. Accompanied by music, the spoken word adds another dimension to the work.
Alissa Ordabai studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Sound Engineering at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts before graduating with a law degree from the University of London. She freelanced as journalist and editor in London from 2006 to 2014, conducting in-depth interviews with artists ranging from Alan Parsons to Aerosmith. After moving to New York in 2015 she worked in classical music management at IMG Artists and in music law at Serling Rooks. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of EastWest Review magazine which focuses on culture, human rights, and foreign policy.