Warlock survives through his songs and his memory is kept alive by the Peter Warlock Society. It was an ingenious idea of Tony Britten to involve society members in his film and nowhere more effective than in the simple telling by Patrick Mills, chairman and founder, of Warlock’s virtually certain suicide. Much of the action is set around pubs between 1925 and 1928, when Warlock lived in the village of Eynsford in Kent. Some of the more hearty songs benefit from being performed in pubs – an essential but often destructive environment for other composers such as Moeran, who appears in the film, and Lambert.

Mark Dexter as Warlock/Heseltine looks right and delivers a mesmerising characterisation that includes the self-destructive qualities that imperilled Warlock’s career. He published vitriolic reviews and wrote insulting letters to establishment critics – one result was to destroy The Sackbut, the magazine he was editing.

The atmosphere of the 1920s is evoked with some magnificent vintage cars and trains; songs such as “Sleep”, “The Fox” and “The Frostbound Wood” (John Mark Ainsley’s Hyperion recordings) are given sympathetic settings. The three principal women in Warlock’s life are all convincingly portrayed, but the other actors should have been credited in the DVD booklet. However, Britten romanticises the role of Winifred Baker, who was described as inarticulate and “a lump of a woman, big with a bad shape”. There is little of Warlock’s role as a prolific writer and editor who anticipated the early music revival, but overall this sensitive and imaginative film will make converts to Warlock and engender sympathy for those who had to deal with a man who created his miniature masterpieces at such extortionate cost.