The history and analysis of Spanish popular music has attracted considerable attention in Spanish academia during the last decade or so. This increasing interest has reached the international sphere as well: in 2013 Routledge published Sílvia Martínez's and Héctor Fouce's Made in Spain – the first English-language edited book to focus entirely on Spanish popular music – and in the same year the annual IASPM conference was held in Gijón, with a considerable range of papers on Spanish topics. Rock Around Spain. Historia, Industria, Escenas y Medios de Comunicación provides a welcoming addition to this scholarship by focusing specifically on rock, the definition of which here appropriately errs on the side of generosity to encompass rock ‘n’ roll, progressive rock, rock urbano, heavy metal, indie and a number of Spanish or regional takes on these genres, such as flamenco-rock and rock bravú. The book's editors, Kiko Mora and Eduardo Viñuela, are right in pointing out that the study of Spanish popular music post-Franco has typically focused on the 1980s Movida. The Movida relied on pop and punk styles rather than rock, but its significance went indeed beyond music: in the Spanish imaginary, it is still widely understood as a counter-cultural movement and an enactment of Spain's entry into European and democratic modernity. Most of the contributions of the book take a most welcomed critical stance on the hegemony of the Movida discourse.

In focusing on rock, the editors are clearly aware that there are tackling new ground. However, their motivations and expectations in doing so come across as a little self-defeating. Even though there is clearly still work to do and this is by no means the ‘ultimate’ book on Spanish rock (as Mora and Viñuela admit in the introduction), the final result could have been more ambitious in terms of going beyond the purely narrative or the anecdotal to identify instead a limited number of case studies useful for an in-depth initial discussion of the main issues surrounding rock in the Spanish context. Indeed, most chapters in the book emphasise breadth rather than depth and are intended as broad overviews of the history, industry, scenes and media of Spanish rock, as indicated in the title. History extends from the beginnings of Spanish rock in the 1950s to 2010, with three chapters by Eduardo García Salueña (1950s to 1970s), Fernán del Val (the 1980s) and Igor Paskual (1990–2010), whereas the Industry section opens with an overview of the period 1975–1985 (by Héctor Fouce) followed by a first-person testimonial case study by Carlos Galán on his experience of managing Subterfuge Records in the 1990s.

In the next section of the book, ‘Scenes’ is intended to mean ‘geographical scenes’, with four chapters on rock in the so-called ‘historical nationalities’ of Spain: Roberto Moso on the Basque Country, Álex Gómez-Font on Catalonia, Luis Clemente on Andalusia, and Gonzalo Cifuentes on Galicia. The final section, on rock and the media, covers traditional mass media (José María Esteban and January Ruiz on press, Juan Pablo Ordúñez on radio, Eduardo Guillot on TV) with the more innovative rock and cinema (Teresa Fraile) and rock and advertising (Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz and Cande Sánchez Olmos).

As an overview or compendium of the main bands, styles and trends happening in the Spanish rock scene from the 1950s to the present, the book covers an obvious gap. Moreover the fact that there are sections on peripheral scenes, on media and industries assures that this is not simply a linear narrative focusing on Madrid and ignoring the social and economic milieu in which rock music took place. However, this approach has also its shortcomings: indeed, some chapters are more successful than others in providing the reader with more than a chronological list of facts and names, and some of them border on the journalistic or the merely anecdotal. Perhaps more importantly, this structure and approach leave some unanswered questions in terms of cohesion between the chapters and, ultimately, the relevance of the book. As has been mentioned before, most of them explicitly share scepticism towards the narrative of the Movida, and this is properly addressed in the introduction, but other allegedly equally overarching topics are not; I would like to mention two of them.

The first one concerns, again, modernity: a significant number of chapters in the book take it for granted that Spain's rock scene has always been characterised by its backwardness (retraso) with respect to other Western countries, to mirror the assumption that Spain itself was backward as a country, primarily as a consequence of the Franco regime (which itself had a complex, somewhat schizophrenic attitude towards modernity which, in my view, is not given full consideration in the book). Such claims of backwardness typically rely, on the one hand, on an understanding of music history as a way forward and, on the other hand, on the idea of Spain's exceptionalism in the European context.

The second topic has to do with an almost instinctive mistrust of any suspected commercialism, which leads some contributors to flatly dismiss certain ramifications of Spanish rock, ignoring the complexities of the landscape of production and consumption. Some chapters do attempt to engage with either of these two concepts critically, as least in passing (Teresa Fraile on the issue of modernity; and Fernán del Val and, especially, Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz and Cande Sánchez Olmos on the issue of commercialism), but future studies on the topic of the Spanish room should not ignore these two elephants in the room.