This book begins with a sort of a promise to a fresh perspective on the study of popular music production. It looks at a series of products, conventionally understood in popular music discourse as components of one cultural phenomenon (a genre, a period), as the outcome of a collective effort by various professions and the individuals who occupied them. Calling its study ‘an ethnomusicology of British Sixties Pop’, the author draws inspiration from social network analysis and from ethnomusicological work on the music culture of North India.

The enormous body of songs and albums produced in the UK from the late 1950s until the end of the 1960s is undoubtedly, in the minds of many scholars and fans, a key period in the history of twentieth-century popular music. Sometimes known in the US as ‘the British Invasion’, various aspects of this body of musical work have been studied from different perspectives. This book examines 1960s British pop as a nascent culture of music creation, produced by an aggregate of individuals who became involved in various facets of popular music production, bringing with them different professional backgrounds. Having to deal with a type of creative work that hardly had any precedent, these individuals developed in a quasi-intuitive manner various techniques and practices that, in retrospect, proved to be the formative blueprint for the production apparatus of pop-rock music.

Thompson identifies and examines five professions, or occupations, as major components of the creative music culture of 1960s British pop: producers, engineers, musical directors, songwriters and session musicians. Each of them is given a chapter. Except for the last one, all chapters have a similar structure. At first there is a lengthy introduction, where he analyses and dissects the actual practices of the occupation. That is, what are the detailed actions and tasks that each of these professionals had to do, in his (practically never her) work. This section is followed by a review of the careers and work of several key individuals for each occupation. The chapter on session musicians is slightly different, as it looks at the career stages and some aspects of the occupation, without devoting whole sections to particular individuals. For its data, the author has conducted interviews with many different individuals, but also relies heavily on the ample existing literature of memories and popular histories about the period.

The book is at its best when documenting the explorative nature of each of the professions. Thus it postulates that ‘the art of production in the sixties meant getting results, whether you knew exactly how you had accomplished this or not. Experimentation with the ever changing equipment and the expectation that the equipment would change created a culture of anticipation that seemed always in pursuit of musical and technological innovation’ (p. 103). And the chapter on sound engineers essentially documents how ‘the nature of the role of the recording technician and his relationship with producers and musicians shifted from that of servant to that of enabler’ (p. 129).

However, for all its originality in approach, the book, in the end, falls short of keeping its theoretical and methodological promise. The network framework and concepts, discussed in the opening introductory chapter, are rarely integrated into the actual ethnography that makes up most of the book. More importantly, the book is written as if previous theoretical and methodological work, especially in the sociology of art and culture, never existed. Integrating into the analysis and interpretation concepts from the work of Howard Becker (Reference Becker1982) on art worlds, from Richard Peterson on the constraints in the production of culture (1990), or from Bourdieu’s field theory (1993), would have greatly enhanced the theoretical impact of the book.

Lacking in theoretical integration, the book becomes in fact a detailed ethnography of pop-rock creative practices in the 1960s. Given that much of the data is taken from already existing sources, the book acts as an educated summary of these sources. This point should not be underestimated. As ‘Sixties British Pop’ was a moment, a collective phenomenon, in which production practices of pop-rock music were in fact moulded, formulated and defined, the book serves as a very efficient reading for anyone interested in learning details about ‘who did what’ and especially how it was done, in the production of 1960s pop music. The ethnographic tone keeps the book from being either an appraisal or a simplistic discovery of ‘behind the stars’ details. This, combined with the detailed, illuminating delineations of the actual, often inventive activities of these creative professions in the making, provides an interesting reading.