In Nowhere Boy, the film biopic of John Lennon's early life prior to the Beatles' first visit to Hamburg, there is a scene where the young Lennon receives a copy of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' ‘I Put a Spell on You’ from a ‘Cunard Yank’ seaman on the Liverpool docks. It is a scene which resonates strongly within the hagiography of Liverpool's popular music and is a good example of the ‘hidden history’ which Michael Brocken's Other Voices admirably both interrogates and challenges. For him, tales of Cunard Yanks bringing home R'n'B records are just stories ‘and tales such as these are the very substance of urban myths and legends’ (p. 29). His refutation of such stories details both the fact that, while Cunard seamen did bring home recordings from their trips, they were of usually of other genres e.g. jazz or country and western, and the fact that most of the songs the Beatles eventually covered were actually available to buy in the UK. However, as the book's title suggests, its main subject matter is of times and music genres which precede the Beatles era of Liverpool – a ‘pre-history’ as Brocken refers to it.

In many respects then, Other Voices makes a good companion piece to Sara Cohen's Decline Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. While in that book Cohen analyses both Liverpool's music culture and the business of making music alongside cultural policy, she also attempts to transcend the associations that Liverpool's music has with just one band (although Cohen does devote one chapter to music tourism deriving from the Beatles). Furthermore, what both books share is a range of topics highlighting Liverpool's diverse musical history.

Brocken's book is divided into nine chapters, and for the most part each one focuses on a different music genre. The first chapter provides a summary of these various disparate popular music forms, which he considers significant to the discourse of the Beatles', and indeed Liverpool's, music history. Each subsequent chapter then focuses on a specific musical form and its associated creative or social spaces. In this way, Chapter 2 examines the importance of dance music for 1930s Liverpool and provides the example that many of these dance venues ‘were still in place as public meeting places for years thereafter, thus contributing to mythologies of place’ (p. 53). The next chapter considers the case of jazz and highlights the significance of class for the development of this music genre in Liverpool, and the subsequent role of the Cavern in both the development of this scene and in response to a nationwide (rather than solely local) interest in skiffle. This is not to say that Other Voices completely avoids any discussion of the Beatles. Chapter 4 focuses, for the most part, on the importance of domestic spaces and specific places for the band's early development in the years 1961 and 1962, and relies to a large extent on personal interviews conducted by the author with Joe Flannery (an important figure in the local music scene at that time). In so doing, Brocken sheds light on the mythologies surrounding the Beatles' involvement with both Pete Best and The Star Club in Hamburg. The following four chapters then consider the ways in which Liverpool's country, R'n'B, folk and cabaret scenes have developed, respectively. The last chapter examines the ways in which popular music has been received in Liverpool and expands on one of the book's central tropes: the importance of the development of recorded music for the popular music making process in Liverpool. Brocken examines a variety of ‘pathways’ where music is consumed and experienced by individuals, highlighting the importance of specific record shops, radio shows, venues and key individuals for authenticating, transmitting and co-creating musical culture. In this way he concludes that there is no centrality to Liverpool's popular music making processes but rather that there are ‘only networks, connections, contingencies, convergences’ … where ‘each and every individual has an important role to play’ (p. 228).

Other Voices is a valuable addition to the academic literature on popular music history. Its rich and detailed analyses of Liverpool's varied music scenes across five decades highlights the limitations of viewing such histories in a linear, reductive fashion. Indeed it successfully argues for understanding a city's popular music history within a much wider context. This context is not just musical but social and cultural. Thus Brocken takes account of multiple discourses and acknowledges the interconnectedness of people, places, spaces and scenes.