If you want to know the history of popular music in all its incarnations through the past century and a quarter, and you only have the time to read one book, then I sincerely recommend this one by Peter Doggett. He writes with authority and a genuine affection for the music, but also a very realistic approach. His prose style is engaging, and while he does give his own opinions on some of the genres he is never overly opinionated.

One of the main things that the book brought home to me -- and no doubt will also do for readers of "a certain age" -- is the performers and songs that were once part of our lives but are long since forgotten. Who recalls Mantovani, Herb Alpert & his Tijuana Brass and, of course, James Last ... not to mention the New Christie Minstrels or The Swingle Singers? We may not have been -- or admit to have been -- fans of any of these, but they were there and no doubt they seeped into our musical consciousness and education.

Doggett traces pop music back to what he sees as the first such song. He states this as being "After the Ball" written by Charles K Harris and reminds us of its construction and of how many successors used similar ideas. He traces its progress to the general public: "It was 'interpolated' into the touring musical A Trip to Chinatown. It was recorded, to piano accompaniment, by George J. Gaskin, 'the Silver-Voiced Irish Tenor' from Belfast; and then by the noted whistler, John Yorke Atlee. The success of Harris's composition was measured not in cylinders or records, however, but in sales of sheet music, which were estimated to run into the millions." This is just one of hundreds of gems one is tempted to recount from this volume of over 600 pages plus footnotes, sources and bibliography.

As a non-musician, some of his writing regarding "beats and bars" went over my head, but he more than makes up for it in reminding us of the music heroes of our past and will send many to the record collections to root out those forgotten tunes that we once played to death.

He reminds us of the dances we danced -- or avoided -- and the genres that came and went, the arguments that ensued when a new style arrived and the condemnation of pop music at every turn.

We think of the 1960s as dominated by "young people and rock or pop music" but he brings us down to earth: "The Stones' 'Satisfaction' and Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' were competing against a trio of instrumentals from Europe, 'Zorba's Dance', 'A Walk in the Black Forest' and 'Il silenzio'. In 1966, as teenage pop's experimentalism started to alarm the unwary, the British charts were awash with ballads by Kenneth McKellar, Ken Dodd, Vince Hill and Val Doonican. The Who's saga of cross-dressing and emotional disturbance, 'I'm a Boy', was outflanked by the mock-1920s revival of the New Vaudeville Band's 'Winchester Cathedral'. Throughout 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, odes to hallucinogenic chemicals and alternative lifestyles sat alongside Petula Clark and Harry Secombe's 'This is My Song', Vince Hill's 'Edelweiss', country ballads from Tom Jones, a duet from Frank Sinatra and his daughter, and a whistling novelty entitled 'I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman'. There was also pan-generational pop, premature easy listening for the switched-on generation: the Seekers' 'Georgy Girl', Sandie Shaw's 'Puppet on a String', even Scott McKenzie's 'San Francisco'."

The book is also a social history of the century, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his quotations of "quality newspapers" and academics condemnation of genres like ragtime and jazz with the blatantly racist stories and headlines -- which I am loath to reprint here.

This is a very readable book. The only fault may be information overload because his research must have been so diligently undertaken.