His theory, well worked through with myriad examples, connections and illuminating digressions, is that to understand how we choose to entertain ourselves we must return, once again, to the Victorians; precisely what Danny Boyle did, Sandbrook explains in his preface, when he created the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 – which is why we liked it so much. On this reading, it’s no surprise that, when the seventeen-year-old Tony Iommi made prosthetic thimbles from melted down Fairy Liquid bottles so that he could continue to play guitar after he had chopped off two fingers in a steel press, he went on to form Black Sabbath; the foundries and coalfields and sheet-metal works that surrounded his Birmingham upbringing, products of the Industrial Revolution, could hardly but lead to heavy metal.
Review of ‘The Great British Dream Factory’ with bonus heavy metal videos
