Provincial Headz provides an historical account of how hip hop culture arrived in the UK, framed around the novel question of the role of non-urban and provincial communities in this process. The author's own experiences, having grown up in Devon in the 1980s, play a large role in framing this study and provide useful material in the form of interviews with practitioner networks, detailed information relating to local ‘scenes’ and effective auto-ethnographic asides. Provincial Headz exceeds in documenting the material conditions of music production for early UK hip hop fans and practitioners: what music was available to them, which samplers and turntables were accessible, which documentary or album first introduced the word ‘hip hop’ to a British teenager's vocabulary, and so on. This level of granularity enables the author to demonstrate how these conditions shifted dramatically over a relatively concentrated period (c.1983–1990) and also how they were modulated by local and regional geographies. For these reasons, it is essential reading for those interested in hip hop culture in the UK and would also be useful to those interested in British popular music and global hip hop culture generally.

Structurally, the book moves through various aspects of UK hip hop culture, sketching out an historical narrative that moves from a confused initial arrival, in the form of ‘electro’ compilations and a popular breakdancing fad, through to more organised and informed modes of consumption, and then on to production, first as imitation and later as a more distinctive creative practice. Thus we have two chapters on the ‘location’ and ‘relocation’ of hip hop, followed by two on consumption, the first of which links to the early spatial material with a focus on newly forming local hip hop ‘territories’. The final two chapters focus on production, with the latter taking on a more social perspective with its focus on identity. Stylistically, we weave between the well-handled personal accounts of the author, a plethora of interviews with hip hop artists active in the era, and the description and analysis of various albums, documentaries and events. All of this is also interwoven with useful snippets of theory; a bias towards scholars writing in the 1970s and 1980s lends a coherence to a subject matter produced out of similar and shared historical conditions.

In broad terms, the book succeeds in its goal of showing that hip hop is not exclusively an urban phenomenon and, furthermore, provides a valuable resource by documenting the forms this took on in Devon and South West England. Two of the book's titular concepts play an important role in articulating this argument: ‘provinciality’ and ‘critical regionalism’. The exploration of a provincial–metropolitan framework for hip hop offers interesting possibilities, especially as ‘provincial’ consumption is crucial to hip hop music (and much else) as a mass cultural phenomenon. The concept sometimes feels ill-defined in practice, however: a passage in the introduction, for example, argues that The Bronx, the widely acknowledged birthplace of hip hop, is itself provincial. Although it may be true that there are features of a provincial–metropolitan relationship between The Bronx and Manhattan, it is also clear that hip hop could only have emerged from a ‘province’ if it happened to form a large part of the world's pre-eminent cultural metropolis. ‘Critical regionalism’ builds upon the notion of provinciality and describes some aspects of hip hop's social impact in this context, arguing that it led audiences and producers to educate themselves on racial struggles, to question their own society at both local and national levels and to develop a sense of empowerment, belonging and creativity. This account, which builds in part upon Homi Bhabha's notion of ‘third space’, would have been complemented by more engagement with the relatively large body of musicological work on ‘global’ (non-US) hip hop, in which post-colonial perspectives are common. This would not only have potentially led to consideration of more negative or ambiguous aspects of the subject matter, such as the issues raised by the appropriation of an African-American, predominantly urban cultural form by rural, mostly white English communities, but may also have helped to articulate some of the critical or counter-hegemonic currents at play in the arrival of hip hop in the UK's provinces.

At its best, Provincial Headz provides an impressively detailed historical account of what stylistic changes or novel techniques were introduced when, which equipment or idea or person instantiated them, and how they were popularised. Highlights include the account of the initial de-racialised branding of hip hop music as ‘electro’, such that many fans for a time had no idea what their favourite music was called or that it was associated with African-Americans; the frequent discussion of compilation albums and their importance to the spread of hip hop and the development of tastes and techniques among engaged audiences; the determining role of geography and the distribution of chain stores in the availability of records and musical equipment; and the strong linkage felt between the four main hip hop ‘elements’, with many provincial practitioners placing an emphasis on mastering graffiti, breakdancing, turntabling and rapping. The author's longstanding engagement with (and love for) the music shines through here, with a massive amount of detail conveyed in a readable and sensitive manner.

Whilst a major strength of this study lies its fine-grained approach to the arrival of hip hop culture in the UK, it would also be complemented well by further study into more recent developments. Especially interesting is the question of how these communities fared in the context of the increasing commercialisation of hip hop in the 1990s and 2000s, and how they responded to the emergence of garage, jungle and eventually grime in UK popular music. The material presented in this book would be useful to any such studies, as it would for any research focusing on global hip hop cultures, the role of ‘provinciality’ in popular culture and more general geographical approaches to popular music.