RaveThe Guardian (UK)... feels vastly broader in scope, by necessity encompassing everything from music hall to Muddy Waters. Because Stanley continues the stories of pre-rock’n’roll stars long after the rise of rock’n’roll a book that begins in Victorian London ends, more or less, in the present day: a huge timespan to cover, even in 600 pages ... As with its predecessor, it shouldn’t work, but it does ... An inveterate record collector, Stanley’s writing crackles with the exhilaration of a man who’s encountered a whole new world of vinyl to obsess about. It adds a fresh excitement to some well-worn stories ... He rattles through anecdotes and potted biographies at a clip that recalls someone hastily ripping one recent purchase off the turntable in order to play you another ... Stanley is admirably unsnobby in his approach ... Let’s Do It’s masterstroke in bringing the past to life lies in drawing parallels with the present, or at least more contemporary history ... a perfect guidebook, filled with smart thinking and the kind of communicable enthusiasm that sends you rushing to the nearest streaming service, eager to hear what all the fuss was about.
Dylan Jones
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Sweet Dreams tactfully sidesteps whether some of the New Romantics mirrored the celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake aspirations of many of today’s vloggers and influencers. But Jones makes a convincing case that their penchant for what used to be called \'gender-bending\' and their sartorial obsession with self-expression as \'a platform for identity\' foreshadows a lot of 2020’s hot-button topics. The book is excellent on the movement’s origins both in the aspirational teenage style cult that built around Bryan Ferry in the mid-70s and the more fashion-forward occupants of the same era’s gay clubs and soul nights ... And Jones is far more clear-eyed about the era than you might expect ... Sweet Dreams loses focus when the New Romantic bands become huge in the US ... Jones seems to lose interest, pursuing other pop-cultural threads that don’t quite tie together, from Madonna and Prince to the launch of the Groucho Club, and Sweet Dreams starts feeling not unlike falling down an internet rabbit hole ... It pulls itself together at the end ... It’s a little over-long and digressive, but you finish the book convinced its author has a point.
Hanif Abdurraqib
PositiveThe Guardian\"... Abdurraqib is blessed with a keen eye for a particularly telling fact, and what seems like digression invariably turns out to make a wider point about music or culture ... amid the personal reminiscences and the writing styled as personal letters to the band’s members, Abdurraqib is both perceptive and sharp, with a frequently bold and an intriguingly atypical viewpoint ... in writing a book that could make even a naysayer want to hear their music as a matter of urgency, Abdurraqib has provided a perfect epitaph.\
