Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep. - - - - |
- - - - Copyright 2003 NewsQuest Media Group Limited
- - - - SECTION: Whatson LENGTH: 380 words HEADLINE: Hornby hits all the right notes. BYLINE: Vicki Green (author email vicki.green@soton-echo.co.uk) DATELINE: BASINGSTOKE BODY: 31 Songs, Nick Hornby, Penguin GBP 6.99 DESPITE the fact that I'm a girl, and have missed out on that cataloguing male brain of names, numbers and non-sense, Nick Hornby has always been one of my favourite writers. Telling real stories of real people, not one of his novels - save perhaps How To Be Good - hasn't left me with a lot to think about. As a great man once said, "We read to know we're not alone", and that's what his writing does for me. But I'll admit I was a little unsure when I heard about his 31 Songs project. A book describing his favourite music - what? Is this a novelist's vanity gone mad? But, thankfully, the answer to that question is resoundingly in the negative, as, instead, Hornby uses the emotion or associations of a myriad of very different pieces of music to recount personal episodes in his own life or more general observations and opinion. He discusses how he eventually stopped liking music called things like Rat Salad just because it sounded tough, or how one song made him actually think about the presence of the divine. The piece on Hey Self Defeater by Mark Mulcahy is, in fact, Hornby's plea to keep smaller musical outlets afloat, namely his favourite store Wood Music. Sadly, he's forced to add as a postscript that it ceased trading this summer. Then his musings on Badly Drawn Boy's A Minor Incident recall his realisation of the song's relevance to the behaviour of his autistic son. I didn't recognise most of the music - although he did prompt me to get my Teenage Fanclub album out again - but that did not diminish the pleasure of reading. I can only be grateful to Hornby for his succinct and convincing arguments in defence of the much-maligned pop genre - "You're either for music or you're against it, and being for it means embracing anyone who's good". Expect his quotations to pop up in my pub defences of '80s cheese from now on. He also unflinchingly puts Dylan in the pop category, and refuses to praise him just for the sake of it in the way that many others do: "I worry that all this Dylan-devotion is somehow anti-music - that it tells us the heart doesn't count, and only the head matters". An intensely readable, unpretentious and wonderful parable on the power of music. LOAD-DATE: November 17, 2003 - - - -
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