I like to fancy I know a little bit about the more obscure corners of the rock world. Did I not, after all, spend 20 years listening to John Peel? Did I not sneer at and spurn the mainstream? I am now chastened. I know nothing. Or at least, nothing compared to Julian Cope, erstwhile frontman of the Teardrop Explodes, now writer, unofficial warden of the ancient sites of Britain, and, by his own admission, spaced-out freak. (And by my own earnest assertion, under-appreciated national treasure.)

Here is a book of umpteen reviews by Cope of umpteen bands, a book so thick that its spine alone can accommodate not only the book's title and author, Faber's logo and a drawing of the Cerne Abbas giant waving an electric guitar, but three quotes from reviews of the book itself (from Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Roddy Doyle and Q magazine). Of these umpteen bands, I had heard of about 11.

I thought it was 12 at first, but I was confusing Rocket from the Tombs with Rocket from the Crypt. However, dig deeper and you notice connections. Rocket from the Tombs was Crocus Behemoth's band before he founded Pere Ubu (a clue, before you even get to the text which explains this, is in the tracklist of their album The World's Only Dumb-Metal, Mind‑Death Rock'n'Roll Band, which includes "30 Seconds Over Tokyo", a song familiar to me from Pere Ubu's repertoire). Crocus Behemoth was, of course, once the stage name of David Thomas, and he and the rest of Pere Ubu, formed in 1975, performed at Shepherd's Bush Hall a few months ago. Do keep up.

The reason you want to read that is – apart, of course, from the idea you might learn something – because of Cope's prose. As far as I know, both the Oxford Style Guide and Faber's in-house manual do not explicitly rule out spelling "was" "wuz", but they don't rule it in, either. Cope uses that spelling when mentioning the band the Pretty Things, who, as Cope puts it, "wuz Born Never Arsed a full decade too early". (In other words, they were punks avant la lettre, and he's right.) The book is almost all written in an unapologetic, Lester Bangs mid-to-late stoned NME style, and it's no accident that the late-hippy adjective "righteous" not only comes up frequently, but is the first word of the book after its introduction. Sentences are long, quirky but controlled – and hugely informative. It is, in short, a celebration of the music Cope is himself celebrating: loud, irreverent, verging on the apparently mindless, but actually possessed of an underlying tight control and intelligence. In other words, just right.

My long research on YouTube has proved that he is not actually making these bands up, and has educated me in the byways and forgotten moments of rock history. Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, for instance, which consisted of Flynt and a friend on drums, made in 1966 the most rudimentary sound conceivable, his song "Uncle Sam Do" being both Fluxus-inspired exercise in audience alienation (it makes the Fugs sound like the Wombles) and protest song, the power of whose protest may have been vitiated by Flynt's refusal to release it beyond a tiny coterie until 2004. Even now, the YouTube recording of that song has fewer than 500 views; and, as Cope says, "the difference between Henry Flynt and most other conceptual artists of his time is that the more you play "I Don't Wanna", the more you need to hear it."

The book is arranged chronologically, and near the beginning there is a touching story of Cope's early exposure to Tom Lehrer – his mother encouraging the metre-high Cope to learn his songs about necrophilia, incest and drug-dealing word-perfect and sing them to astonished house guests as a twisted party trick. Perhaps this sowed the seeds of his appreciation of bands who didn't give a flying one, and the very fact that this book is so enthusiastic about bands who didn't care is a beautiful, enriching irony. Righteous.