The Beat Goes On: Liverpool, Popular Music and the Changing City is a welcome collection of essays, complementing recent studies of Liverpool's popular music history, most notably Sara Cohen's Decline, Renewal and the City: Beyond the Beatles and Michael Brocken's Other Voices: Hidden Histories of Liverpool's Popular Music Scenes: 1930s–1970s. In the former, while attempting to transcend the associations that Liverpool's music has with just one band, Cohen analyses both Liverpool's music culture and the business of making music alongside cultural policy. Brocken, on the other hand, focuses on the historical performance and consumption of a wide variety of music genres before the emergence of The Beatles. Even so, both authors cannot avoid some discussion of the ‘fab four’. In the same way, The Beat Goes On does devote one of its nine chapters to a discussion of The Beatles, with Spencer Leigh focusing on both the band's influence on Liverpool and the way its individual members went on to engage with the city. More importantly, what The Beat Goes On successfully shares with the other two books is a case study approach employing a large number of oral histories. Here, these interviews successfully allow for multiple perspectives on such themes as creativity, representation and the specificity of place.

Aside from Leigh's discussion of the Beatles, The Beat Goes On also treads a familiar path in the first chapter, where Ian Inglis examines the notion of ‘Merseybeat’ and its connection with Liverpool as a city. Whereas Cohen investigates the notion of a more recent ‘Liverpool sound’ without any conclusive results, Inglis argues that the Mersey boom of the 1960s was in fact distinctive due to a lack of a common sound. Furthermore, he argues that as well as a diversity of styles, Liverpool bands labelled as ‘Merseybeat’ were also united by a similar approach to performance and an affinity with the idea of a Liverpool sound. For Inglis, the notion of ‘Merseybeat’ is as much down to the influence of time and place on musical commentary as it is to their influence on the music itself.

The importance of media accounts in constructing specific cultural associations between Liverpool and its popular music is a theme that Robert Strachan expands on in Chapter 3. Along with the ways in which musicians represent the city through their music, lyrics and aesthetic styling, Strachan considers how media narratives contribute to the construction of a collective memory. Cleverly, he charts the way representations of the city have developed through the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, into popular culture via Liverpool acts such as Cilla Black and the Scaffold, and then on through subsequent generations of musicians. These representations have, at differing times, evoked both idealised working-class nostalgia for times past and a grittier exploration of the city's urban decline. Taken together, Strachan argues, these representations have provided a distinct set of associations that help to construct a collective memory. More importantly, he concurs with Lipsitz (Reference Lipsitz1990) when he contends that popular music is a dialogic form, where older representations within the city's popular music inform newer representations, which in turn go on to inform future works.

To an extent, this notion of popular music as a dialogic form is also explored in Chapters 4 and 9. In the former, Sara Cohen and Brett Lashua discuss a number of public houses in Liverpool's old St. Johns shopping precinct, exploring both the ways musicians create musical landscapes that characterise urban environments and, in turn, the ways in which urban landscapes affect music making. Then in Chapter 9 Marion Leonard examines the ways in which Liverpool singer-songwriters characterise the process of song writing. Aside from discussing various concepts, including the over-romanticised notion of the creative impulse and the idea of creativity as a cultural process, Leonard also considers how the city influences creativity. In this respect, she observes that musicians differ markedly in the ways they articulate their relationship to place, and this highlights the multiple ways in which environment can affect creativity and expression. Leonard notes for instance that, through their work, Liverpool songwriters make reference to observations on city life, the city as a place of prestige and the inspiration of the Beatles (as role models). However, the chapter has little to say about the influence of contemporaneous bands or music makers on one another.

The remaining four chapters provide fresh insights into Liverpool's less explored musical histories. Marion Leonard, in a second chapter, examines the experience, hidden in many press reports, of female musicians working within the city's music industries. Robert Strachan also contributes two chapters. One explores the less well-documented soul tradition within the city, while the other aims to situate the legacy of Eric's club, a venue situated within the city's bohemian spaces where art, theatre and music intersected. Lastly, Georgina Young discusses house music in Liverpool, and provides a different perspective on the importance of locality for music making through highlighting the ‘placelessness’ experience of such music.

The Beat Goes On developed out of an exhibition of the same name, which opened as part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008 and it is to be commended for its contribution to the historiography of popular music. Through taking a case study approach it addresses a variety of hidden musical histories, which have up until now remained unstudied. More importantly, however, it reinforces the notion that popular musical practice cannot be condensed into a singular historical narrative, but rather that it is comprised of a set of complex, interwoven and occasionally conflicting multiple histories.