Based on a short memoir by the talented, acid-tongued journalist Lynn Barber (first published in Granta magazine), the movie is set in 1962, when England was gradually emerging from postwar austerities and the fabled antics of swinging London were just getting under way.
That was in 1963, at a time whenthe classical-music establishment was still in thrall to thepostwar professoriate of Austro-German composers and their foreign epigones who believed that the future of music lay not with traditional harmony but with Schoenberg-style serialism.