Stride Magazine - www.stridemagazine.co.uk

31 SONGS by Nick Hornby (195pp £12.99 Penguin/Viking Press)

One thing is definitely true: there are people who have music on, like when they’re fixing the car, or hoovering, or getting drunk at a wedding reception and want to hear “Spirit in the Sky” or “I Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” a few times, and then there are people who love music. Really love it. Not only can’t live without it, but for whom it’s kind of fixed certain things in their lives, defined certain moments, and sublimely explained life. It’s not that “The Birdy Song” will always remind you of that holiday on the Isle of Wight, but that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was how a part of your head was then, and still is, and nothing you could ever say could ever say it better. And these two sets of people are not necessarily the same people. And in something like the same way, there are people who listen to a song and say that maybe that wasn’t the best version of it they’ve ever heard, and perhaps the bass player was feeling a bit low that day, but it was produced by Zelig Butterman, and his work with The Pope Fuckers is the benchmark by which all things are measured, and hey, let’s all sit around and have a party (if you have a window). And some of these are people for whom music is the art that saves their lives, and describes their lives, and fuck ­ they kind of think their lives would’ve been okay if they’d been able to write songs and play guitar and sing and rock and….. Alright, this last attempt at a sentence is me describing myself, sort of, but what the hell. Let me put it like this: I’ve recently (because of circumstances too painful to recount) pulled my drastically reduced collection of vinyl out of an attic and, after the purchase of a new stylus, played a couple of records that I’ve not heard for some time. Tyrannosaurus Rex’s A Beard Of Stars is not the best record ever made, but it’s still wonderful. I’ve never been particularly bothered about or lived in fear of dworns, and you can bet that a druid’s spear is never handy when you want one. But something about that record hits the spot, and it hit it 33 years ago and much to my surprise the spot was still there waiting to be hit a couple of weeks ago. And Eclection’s one and only LP, called Eclection ­ well, it’s about thirty years since I last played that, and I’ve been playing it over and over for the last couple of weeks. Okay, some of the lyrics are dodgy (though not as dodgy as some of Marc Bolan’s) and it has 1968 written all over it (I was still at school when I bought it, and I’ve only ever met one other person who had this record) but still, there’s a spot ­ possibly not exactly the same spot as the other one I mentioned - and it hits it. And this is sort of the point of Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs. It’s a book not about 31 songs, but about the principle behind what these particular songs do for him. At one point, Hornby invokes Walter Pater’s “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” and says that if he’d been able to write music he’d never have bothered with books -- I know exactly what he means. Hornby’s book isn’t about the 31 songs he hangs it around. It’s not even about what those songs mean to him. It’s about what our own 31 (or 23, or 17, or 192) songs are for us, and why, and how. It’s almost about the almost impossible to explain. It reaches out to try and articulate that point about songs where they just absolutely touch us ­ and it’s intelligent enough, too, to realise that sometimes that touching lasts for ever, and sometimes only for a matter of weeks, and both versions are priceless. For me, for example, there’s a point in the electric guitar finale of “Elemental Child” on A Beard Of Stars where what will turn out to be the final, hanging note makes its first appearance, and it’s sounded repeatedly deep in the mix until finally that’s all there is, and the record’s gone. And every time I hear that note’s arrival all I listen to from that point is that note, repeated over and over until it’s there, reverberating, the last note of the last song …. I’d love to be able to explain it better. Then there’s the instrumental break in the middle of Del Shannon’s So Long Baby (well, the whole record, really) and I still think that when I was eight and heard that, I wanted to be alive, because something inside that few moments of noise was what it meant to be alive, but I was too young to understand that it had as much pain in it as pleasure. But when I hear it now, it still does the same mad stuff to me. How to explain that noises like this have spoken aspects of life to me, and made things so clear? (And how to explain, still, that I continue to mess up? Perhaps the two things are inextricably linked.) Then much later, only about three years ago, The Dirty Three showed up with Lullaby For Christie, and I want it played at my funeral, because my heart moves along with every note, and it seems stupid to even attempt to say exactly why. Pop music (or, as Hornby says, anything that’s in rock, pop, soul, trashy whatever) isn’t necessarily “serious”, it just is. And while most of it’s easy, disposable, manufactured, dim, derivative, out for a buck, that doesn’t preclude either (a) an accidental moment of music apparently touched by the hand of God or (b) something you hate and despise meaning the world to me. This is “just art”, with or without a capital letter, and lots of daft stuff is said and written about it, but in the end if you are a music lover (that is, someone for whom music actually makes clear to you what things are, even if you are always forgetting) then you thank your God for it. It doesn’t matter what Hornby’s 31 songs are. I only know a few of them, but I understood every word he had to say about them. Transcendent moments that flicker for a few seconds, songs he’s played over and over for decades, a song he can’t stop playing now but won’t want to hear next month…… I hadn’t even heard of a couple of the bands or singers. It didn’t even matter that I’d seen the movie About A Boy and it hadn’t made me want to read anything by Nick Hornby. It didn’t matter that he doesn’t mention The Incredible String Band, Eclection, or S. F. Sorrow. It didn’t matter that our tastes only seem to overlap occasionally (Teenage Fanclub get two mentions, which is good, but I’ve never really cared about Bruce Springsteen, to be honest). And it didn’t matter finally that, actually, he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about how I feel about music. Sometimes it’s good to be told what you know, just like it’s good to read a book you normally wouldn’t have gone near, and come away pleased that you did.          © Martin Stannard 2003