Barry Faulk's previous book, Music Hall and Modernity (Reference Faulk2004) was a study of late 19th-century literary and journalistic responses to music hall in London. In a footnote he claimed that in the 1960s:

That paragraph in many ways summarises the approach and content of British Rock Modernism. Like Faulk's earlier volume, this is a sequence of case studies bookended by an introduction and conclusion. In addition to chapters on The Beatles' television film Magical Mystery Tour and Village Green Preservation Society, there are studies of the Rolling Stones film Rock and Roll Circus, the Sex Pistols, and ‘British Pop Women Singers of the 1960s and the Struggle for Modern Identity’, which discusses Petula Clark, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield.

The book's strategy begs a number of questions, including the following: What is meant by ‘rock modernism’ and ‘music hall’? What is at stake in articulating rock music to a genre that preceded it by almost a century?

Faulk's grasp of the history of music hall is shaky, in that he massively overestimates its continuing presence in popular culture after 1945. He claims that it ‘constituted [the] first experience of popular culture’ for ‘a generation of British youth born after WWII’ (p. 6, my emphasis). Given that his own discussion mainly concerns musicians born during that war (the Beatles range from 1940 to 1943; Ray Davies' year of birth is 1944), this is at best an irrelevant statement, but it is also patently wrong, as a perusal of any halfway decent biography of British singers or bands born in the 1940s would show. It is the case that there sometimes was an influence from the pub or parlour singing of parents or other adults, some of whose repertoire would almost certainly have originated with music hall stars of a half-century earlier. But by far the principal sources of music for this generation were radio (both the BBC Light Programme and such overseas stations as AFN and Radio Luxembourg) and records. And by far the most important sounds absorbed by this generation were American, or ersatz American.

A similar imprecision is evident when Faulk identifies ‘music hall’ elements in the music and films discussed in his case studies. As he notes himself, these features include the incorporation of circus motifs and proletarian seaside vacations, neither of which are traceable to the specific stylistic features of music hall song or comedy routines.

The author has a few interesting and original thoughts but is incapable of developing these in a systematic or telling manner. Instead, the chapters leap off in various biographical or sociological directions. There are also an unacceptable number of minor errors. The title of The Kinks' album Lola vs Powerman & the Moneygoround, Part One is mangled so that it becomes incomprehensible, the Dave Clark Five are said to have come from the north of England (when it was actually north London), Paul Robeson's film about a Welsh mining community The Proud Valley is said to be set in ‘North England’, and the promoter of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival is wrongly identified as Murray Lerner, the American film director. Faulk proclaims himself to be ‘deeply indebted’ to Simon Frith, but not so deeply that he doesn't think the co-author of Art Into Pop was Herbert (no, it was Howard) Horne and also gets the publication date of Performing Rites wrong.

A review of Music Hall & Modernity in the journal Victorian Studies described it as ‘a puzzling mixture of suggestive insights, assiduous scholarship, special pleading, and theoretical turgidity’ (Wilson Reference Wilson2005). I can think of no better epitaph for British Rock Modernism.