Anyone with a love of folk music will find something of interest in this book but otherwise it is a confused and repetitive read which fails to spin a convincing narrative.

Too much of the book is taken up by blow-by-blow analyses of albums by the author's favourite artists. Once he gets onto the sixties and seventies he constantly goes over the same time period for each artist under discussion. By the end of the book you will have lived through the early seventies multiple times over and be drowning in the purple prose Young reserves for his personal favourites.

As a couple of other reviews have mentioned, his judgement is often flawed. Much as I like Kate Bush I cannot see any but the most tenuous link to folk music and to suggest that Talk Talk are inheritors of the folk tradition is simply not credible. More disturbingly some key figures are omitted or barely mentioned. A history of twentieth century folk without an in-depth consideration of Nic Jones contribution is unsound and his assessment of more recent folk bands is equally patchy. No Bellowhead for instance. It is particularly the artists Young doesn't discuss which make me most suspicious of his knowledge and of his judgements.

There is a need for a history of folk which better integrates with notions of what it means to be British and the influence of class, customs and paganism and to be fair he makes a decent attempt at these aspects. Ronald Hutton's work appears in the bibliography and I wish Young had spent more time understanding this material and less time discussing music which is often peripheral to the real history of twentieth century folk music. ( )