Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Lavinia Greenlaw
Faber 2007
This is the kind of book boys usually write – an account of a seventies childhood told through the prism of music. However, its non-ironic style immediately distinguishes it from the Hornby / Hornby lite competition. It had lots of resonances for me: a youthful obsession with punk and post-punk, a rural upbrining too far away from the bright lights, a potentially dangerous refusal to play the exam game just at the wrong time. However, I would have liked it to be less episodic. On my metaphorical flu sick bed I wanted to read something with a bit of narrative to get my teeth into rather than the collection of linked – but sometimes not chronologically – events presented here. At the same time the pedantic boy in me disputed some of this girl’s facts: on 20th June 1980 she only had one more exam to sit, so she couldn’t have spent the whole of the exam period watching Wimbledon, which didn’t start until the 23rd; Ring My Bell was Number One in 1979, not 1980; Devo’s version of Satisfaction came out in 1978, not 1977. Her assertion that “we reveal something of our nature when we sing” also worried me. All that aside, this is a beautifully written, interesting account of what those days were like for a girl (oh to have had some insight into that at the time!) and a timely reminder, as I charge up my iPod with its 4000+ songs, of just how precious and rare music once was.
14th April 2009
http://www.laviniagreenlaw.co.uk/
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