For crying out bleep bleeping loud. The Go button gremlin got in the way again. Take three. Can one of the mud elves straighten this lot out.

It definitely needs a more detailed study than I was able to give it at the time. Indeed, despite its comparative brevity, Harker managed to pack an awful lot of often very detailed information. I did pick up a few mistakes in the text, but they are mostly fairly trivial, and do not interfere with the basic narrative. What's more the footnotes are a positive tour de force.

The problems I had with it were two fold.

1. It could have been a lot more sympathetic towards its subject. Yes, MacColl had a lot of quirks, and rather more of them than I had previously realised. But when you set his faults against the litany of things he acheived they somewhat diminish in importance. Also, however much MacColl may have got up people's noses, and irrespective of the fact that I nowadays disagree with virtually every aspect of his thinking, he stood for a world which was free of racism, oppression, war, class disadvantage and most of the other social evils which afflict this society of ours. As far as I am concerned, that puts him on the side of the good guys.

2. Here and there I got the feeling that Harker didn't fully understand MacColl's theoretical perspective. Certainly he doesn't get to grips with it in the book, although that may be a function of publishing constraints. In any event, I can't recall one single word on MacColl's abiding preoccupation with singing style.

Moreover, I felt the book ended abruptly. A closing chapter discussing MacColl's enduring legacy, and where Peggy and the rest of the MacColl family are at these days should have been essential; publishing constraints or no publishing constraints.

What we need then is a much bigger biography, and one which critically assesses MacColl's theories, and his contributions to radical theatre and the folk revival. Unfortunately, that is not what we are likely to get and, for whatever shortcomings Harker's biography suffers from, it is still a valuable insight into the life of possibly the most important figure the British folk revival ever produced.