Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone: 125 Years of Pop Music by Peter Doggett, book review

Reaching the closing stretches of It's Too Late to Die Young Now (2014), his entertaining memoir of life as a music journalist on the 1990s-era Melody Maker, Andrew Mueller files the not wholly unheralded judgement that rock and roll has, as he idiomatically declares, "pretty much had it". There will still be great bands; there will still be good music; but a long, hard look at the evidence suggests that since the decade-and-a-half from 1954 to 1969, book-ended by Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland "everybody has just been playing dress-up".