As newly turned teenager in the early 1970s the present reviewer went down to the railway kiosk in suburban Copenhagen each Saturday to spend my hard-earned money on copies of New Musical Express. Sometimes I could afford a copy of Melody Maker as well and, a few times each year, even a copy of Rolling Stone. These magazines – studied from the first to the last page – presented an endless row of epiphanies and a window to a constantly fascinating world of rock and other musics (as well as to the intricacies of the English language). It was like that in Denmark, and it certainly was like that in the UK as documented by the recollections of many of the contributors to the present volume. A few of these remained readers only while most became contributors as well in due time.

Many years later, in 2015, writer and editor Mark Sinker organised a conference, Underground–Overground: the Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968–85, in London which brought together writers, editors, academics, media commentators and even a few readers who had contributed to or had aninterest in rock, rock writing and countercultural voices. A Kickstarter campaign enabled publication of a varied series of texts related to the conference: transcripts of some of the discussion panels, interviews with and memoirs and essays by a broad range of primarily writers and editors from the period in question, about 30 in all. Sinker himself is a freelance writer and editor active in the field in question from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s writing for and editing NME and The Wire among other things.

Hidden Landscapes contributes to the growing number of books dealing with the historiography of rock criticism. By now there is a long tradition for anthologies of magazine articles – starting perhaps with Jonathan Eisen's multi-author collection Rock of Ages (Reference Eisen1969), and soon followed by single-writer collections like Richard Goldstein's Goldstein's Greatest Hits (Reference Goldstein1970). By now, this type of publication has been taken over by internet sites, most notably Rock's Back Pages, which contains actual texts, and more indirectly, rockcritics.com where aspects of (older) rock criticism are debated. In popular music studies rock criticism has never been a central topic even though writers like Simon Frith and Steve Jones (both critics as well) have written about it since the 1980s. After the millennium a few academic books have seen the light of day (Jones Reference Jones2002; Lindberg et al. Reference Lindberg, Gudmundsson, Michelsen and Weisethaunet2005; Powers Reference Powers2013; Brennan Reference Brennan2017), while oral memories and historical narratives based on interviews have been few and far between (Draper Reference Draper1990; Gorman Reference Gorman2001; Long Reference Long2012). A Hidden Landscape belongs to the last category and is by far the most interesting because interviewees and panellists are allowed to talk at some length and because it is obvious who is talking. The downside is that some of the arguments and main points are repeated several times, especially the processes concerning the rebranding of New Musical Express in 1972–1973. Apart from this the book contributes – like most of the other titles mentioned – to the construction of a ‘golden age’ of rock writing, here in the UK version with the 1970s and 1980s New Musical Express and its star writers as the pivotal point. Luckily, this is balanced by including in the multi-faceted narratives the two other British weeklies, Sounds and Melody Maker, as well as the many specialist magazines.

Hidden Landscapes includes the voices of people in their sixties or even older. Through seven chapters, they come to speak in a roughly chronological succession, beginning with Val Wilmer's recollections of being a young woman interested in and writing about black music in the late 1950s and ending with a brief essay by Paul Gilroy. The book's main thread is the question of how rock and other popular music criticism of the period can be considered oppositional or, rather, how rock writing took place in a cultural space of its own creation, between underground and overground. This question of opposition vs. mainstream can be followed all the way through the book as rock criticism first entered all kinds of written media, for example, the mainstream daily newspapers; as it secondly evolved from underground, politically motivated magazines to connoisseur-based magazines; and finally as it continually repositioned itself in the weeklies. The conclusion is that this critical and carnivalesque space indeed existed, that it has subsequently disappeared, and that consumer guides are all that is left. It is not the book's intention to discuss post-millennial criticism, but it would have been good if the broad dismissal of modern criticism and the negligence of the blogosphere were founded on arguments.

The many different voices give a sense of coherence to the field, as most appear to actually know each other or at least each other's writings. Apart from Charles Shaar Murray and Paul Morley, the most famous or notorious writers have been left out. Instead, writers and editors from the whole period come to tell their part of the tale, beginning with jazz critic and photographer Val Wilmer and ending with the youngest, musician and journalist Bob Stanley. Mirroring the field of rock criticism, only five of the voices are those of women. While nearly all voices wrote for the ‘inkies’ for shorter or longer periods of time as staffers or freelancers, many of them worked for small, independent magazines as well. A few even worked mainly at the small publications (Penny Reel, David Widgery, Idris Walters, Mike Atkinson). The editorial work process is also well represented, with most of the stories again from the ‘inkie’ editorial offices: for example, Richard Williams of Melody Maker and Tony Stewart of NME. These are stories of chaos and collaboration.

Interviews and panels are recurrent text formats. They are mixed with memoirs of critics who have passed away (James Hamilton, David Widgery), with recollections of incidents (interviewing Andy Warhol) and bygone niche magazines (Street Life, Spare Rib and MUSICS), and with an analysis of the rock/pop split as articulated in Disc and Music Echo in the first half of 1967 by Jon Savage. The writers and speakers contributing to the last chapter raise some general criticisms of the period's writing, the most important issue being how questions of race and the presence of black people in the UK were dealt with by the music press (answer: either not at all or in a rather patronising way). Paul Gilroy refers to contributions by black British (and US) intellectuals that have seemingly vanished in the oral history writing of the conference. Such contributions have actually demonstrated different ways of writing. Gilroy also asks what would happen if magazines like Black Music Echoes and Black Music were placed not peripherally but at the centre of historical narratives on criticism at, for example, NME’s expense? What kind of history would then be told? Another issue, raised by Simon Frith, concerns the absence of dancing in rock criticism in general. Dancing is hardly commented upon even though it obviously meant and means a good deal to most people (Northern Soul is only one example). One might add that the visual layout of the magazines, including photography, is yet another overlooked aspect of the UK music press.

In his introductory essay – in itself a 40-page historical analysis – Mark Sinker presents the theoretical framework for the book as he identifies the period's music press discourse as creole, as ‘a speaking caught between cultures’, between radicalism and establishment, between mere role playing and negotiations of identities (p. 8). The radicalism and the seriousness came from the non-mainstream music cultures and from the ‘underground’ associated with youth rebellion and with left-wing politics, while ‘the establishment’ was made up primarily by the ‘inkies’ and by the ad-buying recording industry. Major publishing houses published the ‘inkies’, but most of the time these publishers focussed on other parts of their businesses, at least until the 1980s, thus giving the magazines quite a loose leash. The magazines became this meeting place in-between that became a cultural education for a few generations of music fans, as Tony Tyler of NME was supposed to have said: ‘We don't just write about the music, we write about what the music is about’ (p. 141). For a few decades the weekly magazines were ‘a forum for engagement’ (p. 38), first and foremost through the introduction of an extremely wide variety of musics, but also of other popular culture products, and sometimes even debated within the framework of high theory.

Hidden Landscapes is a mixed bag of comments, recollections and analyses of rock criticism loosely held together by the question of how such a discourse for a time helped define a place in-between underground and overground. The diversity of its voices is most welcome as they tell their stories of writing and reading about rock and other musics and because they point to a lot of less well-known aspects and details of the trade and sometimes connect the dots in new ways. Taken together, the many voices produce an impressionistic panorama of the 1970s and 1980s UK music press in all its glory and conceitedness, and the volume will be of interest to many scholars as sources of information on how the music press worked.