There are few books that deal with music and radio, and fewer that are as meticulously researched as this one. It has already won Best Book at the IASPM-Canada 2013 conference, and the rear jacket blurbs feature serious names from both Popular Music Studies and Radio Studies, my own two main areas of interest. So, a little like when one of your trusted friends tells you a new album is brilliant and you really have to listen to it, I approached this work with a little trepidation.

As it turns out, I shouldn't have been unduly worried. Christina L. Baade's work is clearly structured both thematically and chronologically, an issue to which I'll return a little later. She makes a clear connection throughout between the work of the BBC, the role of popular music (and dance) and the war effort, from a scene-setting opening chapter on the BBC and dance music between the World Wars, through to 1945 and beyond. Along the way Baade deals with gender, sexuality, race and the relationship between the State, broadcasting and popular culture. There is as well a fairly constant undercurrent of the musical influence, then physical presence, of the ‘Americans’ (damn them, with their groovy tunes and their ability to dance!). Baade's research does show, however, that the Brits were having a fair amount of music-fuelled fun before the US showed up, despite the often grim situations in which they found themselves. I say ‘Brits’, but as a Northern Irish guy based in Scotland, it seems to me that much of the British-ness discussed here is about English-ness. This is no fault of Baade's – it is, I suspect much more a reflection of the London-centricity that characterised the BBC even more strongly than before, during the war period.

Like many debut books in our field (and I imagine many others) this book is a development of a doctoral thesis, and in places the excellent level of detail in the research might potentially be a bit overwhelming for the educated lay reader. On the other hand, if there's a fan group that loves previously unknown facts and densely accurate detail I suspect the overlap between popular music and radio enthusiasts is the place to find them. What is perhaps even more important is the way in which Baade leaves the reader to make the connections between the pre-war and wartime events and issues, and their relevance to scholars of more recent historical or contemporary social, cultural and industrial phenomena.

There are some wonderful thematic resonances for the scholar of more recent popular music and radio studies. Certain strands of ‘ephemeral’ dance music in the early 1940s were seen as a threat to the proper order of things by the cultural elite and mainstream institutions. Just as it was when kids danced to rock and roll in the 1950s, soul, ska and mod bands in the 1960s, disco in the 1970s, rave in the 1980s and so on. Baade notes that the BBC was nervous of the practice of ‘egregious plugging’ of songs as early as the late 1930s and into the early 1940s, at least 15 years before the so-called payola scandals of the late 1950s in the US. Not to mention the … erm … enthusiastic promotional practices of the UK record industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, there is some excellent material here addressing the wartime status of the BBC licence fee, early BBC audience research and the key role of the nation's broadcaster as maintainer of morale and builder of notions of identity, from nationhood to gender.

The social status of musicians is covered with an excellent discussion of the contrast of the notion of the ‘soldier-hero’ with cowardly musicians (the Daily Express, who would have thought …?), musicians who, Baade notes, were largely called up to fight on the front line with only around 20 per cent of working musicians left behind on the home front. Here, as in heavy industry, there were opportunities for women while men were in the armed services, as exemplified by Ivy Benson and her Ladies Dance Orchestra (sometimes the ‘All Girl Band’). Elsewhere Baade contrasts the media representations of an idealised and unthreatening home front pin-up girl with the grittier real-life sexual and romantic experiences of British forces overseas in places like Cairo, with its well-patronised STD clinic.

Overall then, a fascinating read and a sound addition to any reading list for pop music studies, radio studies or social history more generally. Check it out.