Earlier this year, when I interviewed Mark Blake about his excellent Us & Them book about the Hipgnosis design studio, we concluded that another sub-branch of this obsession was the habit of Biro doodling on school bags (and the undersides of many a school desk lid…) the artistically designed logos of bands like Genesis or AC/DC. To the adolescent us, it was A Thing.
It’s why our middle aged contemporaries still queue outside record shops at five in the morning on Record Store Day to buy the “limited edition” coloured reissue of an album we already own, probably on several formats. Simply because we have to have it.
One of the greatest portrayals of this umbilical relationship with buying, owning and curating music is High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s readily identifiable 1995 novel about the emotionally stunted 35-year-old owner of an Islington record shop, who processes the trauma of yet another break-up through the weed-depth compilation of a mix tape.
Hornby’s chief protagonist, Rob Fleming, engages in a seemingly never-ending series of pedantic arguments with his employees, Dick and Barry, on topics such as whether to store albums alphabetically, generically or chronologically.. “The thing that interested me about people like the characters in the book,” Hornby has explained, “is that what they listen to all the time is incredibly emotive and yet they’re very anal about stuff.”
In Stephen Frears’ masterful screen adaptation of the book, Rob is transported to Chicago (and renamed Rob Gordon) with John Cusack in the lead role. In one of many fourth wall-breaking narratives, he establishes the premise of why he owns the record shop, and who it sells to: “I own this store called Championship Vinyl. It’s located in a neighbourhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not re-released - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I’d feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn’t...well…kinda one of them.”
Conversations between Gordon and the awkwardly shy Dick and the acerbic counterweight Barry (memorably played by Jack Black in his first major screen role), faithfully appropriate the level of fanaticism chaps will sink into (sample argument: after Rob has included Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in one of his top five lists, Barry sarcastically counters: “Oh, that's not obvious enough Rob. How about The Beatles? Or fucking Beethoven? Side One, Track One of the Fifth Symphony! How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”.
The undisputed companion to High Fidelity’s exploration of masculine musical neuroses is Giles Smith’s 1987 memoir Lost In Music, which is being republished today. It’s an autobiographical account of Smith’s own journey through music, from growing up in Colchester (the same London satellite town that begat Blur), to having somewhat unrequited musical ambitions of his own. It is riotously funny in recalling that journey, and the mania Smith - and I suspect plenty of others - become consumed by.
“This book is the story of that voyage - one man’s journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum’s,” Smith explained in the book. “And at the same time it’s a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And boy, can pop get a hold. It’s pushy like that. You’ve really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it’s telling you what to wear and picking your friends.”
A case in point: I was 17 on 13 July 1985, the date of one of the greatest events in musical history: Live Aid. It was an impressionable time. I had no ambition (well, relatively little…) of becoming a pop star myself, but I was easily influenced. I obsessively bought a pair of white dance shoes from the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden because Bryan Ferry wore the exact same pair at Live Aid. Ditto, the 12-pleat blue-grey trousers Bowie wore during his set. Likewise the bright yellow shirt George Michael wore during the Wembley finale.
I wasn’t alone. “I really fancied Sting’s job. Great pay: the best pay,” Smith wrote. “Superb hours too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand’s old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom.“
Smith did eventually break out of his suburban Essex confines in the pursuit of pop stardom, as a keyboard player, the result of concluding that he couldn’t play guitar and would therefore be denied the preening glory that all axemen indulge. “Keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks of Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself,” Smith concludes. He also acknowledges that playing one of those keyboards that you wear like a guitar - Herbie Hancock comes to mind - is no substitute, either. “…it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career envy.”
Eventually he experienced some fame with Cleaners From Venus. “For every Simple Minds there are dozens, even hundreds, of Cleaners From Venuses,” wrote the late John Peel in his review for The Guardian of Lost In Music, “bands which, according to the accountants and promo hit squads, have failed. I know about these failures and I respect them. Some of the best music I have heard has been made by failures. This book could equally well have been, say, the Skip Bifferty Story, the Stackwaddy Story or the Bogshed Story, but these bands had no Giles Smith to record the handful of games with the reserves they played before their free transfer to oblivion.”
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| John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity © Touchstone Pictures |
Lost In Music describes in glorious detail the foundations of his relationship with music, from the High Fidelity-esque arguments over which ranked higher out of T.Rex or Slade, to standing in vain on a Colchester street corner hoping that Marc Bolan might happen to drive past en route to a music festival in Clacton. We’ve all probably done it. But it is precisely this lack of logical thinking that underpins the male obsession with music, and is the frankly hilarious - if worryingly resonant - thread coursing throughout Lost In Music. It is balanced perfectly between anecdotes of being that fan, to being that fan who wants to really be on stage. “You really want to be a rock star, but then you discover that you’re really just a fan,” Smith recently told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen on their Word In Your Ear podcast.
In the years since Lost In Music first came out, much has changed. Smith, who has written for Q and Mojo, went on to become a brilliant sports columnist in The Times. The vinyl record has been, gone, and come back again. The album sleeve has lost its great significance as it has been reduced to a thumbnail on a streaming app. That said, Smith told Hepworth and Ellen: “It’s a golden age to be a fan and a listener. When the book came out [in 1987] it was possible to get excited by the fact you could listen to music on a Walkman. And then not long after the book came out you had the iPod which could contain 40,000 songs. Suddenly you have streaming, which brings you everything all the time. In terms of the hardware you use to consume this stuff, that’s changed but we haven’t. People of our generation still cling to the physical format, but I look at my kids and they own nothing - it’s all on their phones. the fetishism has gone. I envy them, as they travel light!”
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| Yours truly, in front of his alphabetically ordered record collection |
Years ago I went through a purge of my CD collection, mainly to accommodate a girlfriend’s request to make my then-home a little less of a man cave. Of the roughly 1200 discs I had at that moment in time (fuelled largely by visits to Tower Records branches in the US in the good times when a pound bought you two dollars or so), I had half professionally ripped onto a hard drive before selling them to a second hand dealer in Amsterdam.
In his book Smith describes this as a form of purification, but also part and parcel of the awkward selectivity and margin calls that come with owning and listening to records. “When I went to the shelf and took down, say, [Stevie Wonder’s] Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings, or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat, because of its contrast with the enormous, patiently accrued pile of old chaff.”
All music fans, to varying degrees, apply this arch subjectivity. At its extreme, exhaustingly so. “Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Rob Gordon informs his estranged girlfriend Laura in High Fidelity. “No, it’s really not,“ she replies. “You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.” “Made,” he retorts. “Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.” Mansplaining, as much as that comes across (Cusack has acknowledged the masculine toxicity that his character exudes), it does also faithfully capture the inanity that Smith also delves into in Lost In Music, the “emotional librarian” that lies in most men, to quote a Guardian review of the book.
“The book did want to be quite proudly wrong about things, which isn’t often really a strength about rock writing,” Smith said on Word In Your Ear. “I think people like to feel they’re championing a right cause and getting behind the stuff that matters.” Actually, he did.
Lost In Music is an extraordinary, personal and resonant exploration of the transformative power of music, but also what drives the obsession. For some, that obsession shapes their lives. For others it provides context. Some simply can’t function without music, while others will go to extreme lengths to consume it. That’ll be me, then, someone who once drove for 12 hours on a 900-mile round trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. You had to be there. You had to be me.
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