I've just finished it. It's a huge piece of work, mostly well-written, and with copious references. However I disagree with Mike that it's about the evolution of the folk scene. It's not, and in fairness I don't think it's intended to be. The book is subtitled "Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music" and it's about the influence of the English pastoral and paganism on popular music.

Young attributes this influence mainly to folk music, and much of the book is about folk-rock and folk-influenced singer-songwriters. However to attribute these ideas to "folk" is only partly true - some folk song is about these, but much isn't - and Young himself illustrates that influences also came from literature, poetry and philosophy.

The zenith of this was the 1960s, when popular music was a mixture of pop, rock, folk, jazz, world music, early music and musicians of all backgrounds were being influenced by aspects of these, and influencing others in turn. Of course, folk-rock eventually turned out to be a dead end.

Young ignores, indeed is dismissive, of the mainstream folk scene. He describes it at the end of the 1960s as "stagnating" - I didn't get involved until 1970 but the club scene I entered was far from stagnating. Musicians like Nic Jones get barely a mention, while Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick feature mainly because of their involvement with Steeleye Span and Morris On. The Watersons feature mainly because of the imagery of Frost and Fire. He devotes considerable space to Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan and others who were virtually unknown at the time and most of whom remain obscure.

He describes the 1970s as a "slide back to the traditional repertoire" and describes band names like Hedgehog Pie, Pyewackett and Fiddlers Dram as "irritatingly parochial", while allowing names like Dr Strangely Strange or Fairfield Parlour to pass without comment. The unspoken implication is that folk-rock was the true direction of folk music and that folk can only be regarded in terms of its interaction with the mainstream music scene - a point of view which I reject.

In short, it's a fascinating but blinkered history of a particular facet of the music scene where folk, pop and rock music overlapped, before being killed off by punk.