Certainly an impressive undertaking at over 600 pages, Bob Stanley acknowledges in an aside or two that the research process for Let’s Do It was fairly pleasurable as these things go. It’s a prehistory of 20th-century pop music, mostly covering the time before that terminology was coined: it concludes in the 1970s, and with the decade’s more MOR offerings, but emphasises a lineage from, say, Barry Manilow back to his musical theatre ancestors like Rodgers & Hammerstein.

It’s also a prequel to Stanley’s other pop opus, Yeah Yeah Yeah: readers au fait with that book might identify a common spirit, with nets cast wide and efforts to appear objective while being opinionated coming off. Let’s Do It stands perfectly well on its own, though. Music hall, ragtime, jazz (which Stanley deems off-limits for this book once it takes on anti-populist stances), blues, country (a case for greater inclusion of which could be made), the crooner-into-easy listening continuum and rock’n’roll; the onset of amplification, microphones, sound in movies, vinyl at 45 and 33; the impact of both world wars, and the stylistic cross-pollination between, almost exclusively, Britain and the United States.

Pre-pop pop is a story of systemic racism, sexism and necessarily concealed sexuality, as is basically all of the last century’s entertainment industry. It’s also, per myriad examples offered by Stanley, instructive to consider that the paying public was often nowhere near as bigoted as those selling the wares thought, or wanted. Many names profiled in Let’s Do It have been largely forgotten, sometimes because of one or more noted isms, and the author – whose tastes often gravitate to acts who fell through the cracks – rightly relishes the chance to talk up acts from Anita O’Day to Anthony Newley.