Books about music

I’ve just finished reading Simon Armitage’s Gig and am halfway through Mark Radcliffe’s Thank You for the Music. Last year it was Stuart Maconie’s Cider with Roadies and Ian Clayton’s Bringing it all Back Home. What do they have in common? You probably already know this, but they’re all Northerners writing about how they’ve grown up with music and its continued importance in their lives. They’re well written, full of English self-deprecation, and very funny… except the last chapter in Clayton’s book which had me in tears (the regular kind) on a flight from Philippines to Singapore, sitting next to a nun. And they have all, at some time or other, been in bands, except Clayton.

The authors are all about my age, which means we grew up with the same music. Bowie doing Starman on TOTP, Roxy Music, a fair amount of Prog (like Maconie I had an early fixation with Focus), the epiphany of punk, Peel, the music papers (remember them?), and into the 80s with whoever took your fancy. It’s amazing how important those formative, teenage years were. We were lucky to grow up in the 70s. A bleak decade in many ways, but musically it was incredibly exciting and varied. Glam, prog, Krautrock, punk, new wave, the untouchable Bowie (then and only then), Abba, the glory days of Eno, Reich & Glass and of course Pan’s People. Methinks, there’s nothing so rich nowadays?