Religious Faith and Scholarship: Exploring the Debates: ASHE Higher Education Report, Vol 33... Book

A quirky, indestructibly vulnerable and engaging piece of work. Not quirky as if ladling it on. The guy's almost self-consciously, apologetically normal in fact, but all this quirky stuff happens and he's obliged to report it, right? Having taken the advance for the memoir.

A rock journo, apparently, Giles Smith's decided to serve up his life to us in seven-inch and twelve-inch single slices, plus whatever inches albums used to be when they were LPs. It's an autobiography of his record collection, basically - chronicling his love of pop music, his obsession with acquiring and cataloging records (oh, the obsession! oh, the cataloging), and his efforts to carve out some life, any life for himself within those empyrean realms as a songwriter, member of small-time bands, and prospectively eventually, the next Sting. Spoiler, it never happens. It rarely does.

Along the way, we are treated to chapters on Marc Bolan, Stevie Wonder, Nik Kershaw and many others, mostly as framing devices to discuss what was going on in his budding young life at that time. It's an effective conceit, made so by the breathlessly confessional tone with which he shares what made these artists' works so compelling at the time, and (in many cases), so distinctly embarrassing in hindsight. Rarely has the course of one man's blinding, slightly vague ambition been rendered with so little concern for ego after-the-fact.

As an aspiring popstar and later, as a contented settler for a music press credential and a daydream job chronicling the livers of his erstwhile dream (and losing his spleen in the process), he has his brushes with fame, industry shenanigans, a West German album deal and consequent German tour, a band falling apart, and having it all crash down around him rather clamorlessly, plus the not terribly unexpected disillusionment of interviewing Phil Collins and some others. It ends on a happy note, but I shan't dream of spoiling it for you.

He never meets Sting. Or if he does, he plays coy.

That's not the happy note.

Smith is a fast, slippery, quippy, effortlessly entertaining writer. You feel as if the quips and slips just happen to him, and he's reporting them. Every few sentences it seems, a sentence will turn in its course and bite the previous one on the tail, to deeply wry humorous effect. Yet they all march on innocently, as if completely unaware of these pawky tricks and stingers laying in wait, and the reader is taken in as well. The punchlines land often with a cringe and a wince, but it's of sympathetic pain and vicarious shame. There's considerable zing here, and precious little snark.

Very good read. A book for anyone who's ever hopelessly loved music, and especially human beings.