I found the 'irritating mistakes' to be more writerly than factual: I appreciate it's a huge book, but every couple of pages there'd be a clunker of a mixed-metaphor or dangling clause or sentence that didn't semantically mean quite what its author seemed to think it did. I did feel like Faber took the eye off the ball on the editorial/proofreading front.


In general I found it a bit hack-ish: it suffered from the music journo's impossible desire to cram in every single thing he likes about music. His stated remit - the visionary in English music - gave him a baggy enough tent to house most of his interests under, conveniently allowing him to write about people like Kate Bush as well as Pentangle or Fairports. It even let him cheat a bit - he writes about Ewan MacColl and industrial folk music precisely because of its *difference* from the visionary, pastoral aesthetic he was supposedly writing about.

There was also not a great deal about the actual *music*. I don't mean the instrumentation, or the musicians - I mean the music. That's one of the funniest things about music journalists - they generally prefer writing about musicians to writing about music.

In short, I felt Rob Young is an excellent (and dedicated) historian, a slightly wobbly theorist and a tolerable writer (with a tendency to think he's Iain Sinclair that really doesn't suit him).

That said, it didn't prevent me from enjoying it as a whole. I liked the bits about the classical composers best - Vaughan Williams, Peter Warlock et al - and I thought he had the most insightful things to say about them.