31 Songs - Nick Hornby

 31 SONGS - NICK HORNBY

If you're a writer and you like music it should be relatively easy to combine the two, should it not? One should compliment the other to make a third unique thing unto itself. A significant other. Not everyone can write or rather they can but not everyone can write well, although everyone likes music, surely? In fact, there are only two instances that come to mind when someone said they didn't. One was John Lydon though with the added caveat that he likes his own, that being the music of Public Image Ltd. The other instance being Mick Jagger's character in the film Performance, said as a reply to being asked to play a tune.

Writing about music is like dancing to architecture, of course, though that's not to say the reader can't glean anything from it at all, and actually some of the most enjoyable writing I've ever encountered has been about music but only when it reaches the point of metamorphosing into something of its own. How to explain this? Mix two colours together and you'll get a different colour. Mix two shades of the same colour and you'll get a different shade. It's not alchemy at all, in fact it's really very simple - but it can be magical.

So, to Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs where he tells us what music means to his life through a soundtrack of 31 of if not always his most favourite songs then what are some of the most meaningful to him. Nick Hornby's a well-established writer - Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About A Boy - that everyone knows of even if they've only watched the film adaptations of his books. It's also well-known that he's a big football and music fan so a book by him where he writes about specific songs should be of interest. Right?

"I wanted mostly to write about what it was in these songs that made me love them," he says "not what I brought to the songs." And that's a good distinction, actually. Writing about what a song reminds you of is actually writing about memories rather than the lyric or the music itself.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" as Hunter S Thompson once said and the weird thing about Nick Hornby is that he's got a pretty weird taste in music. Not weird as in experimental or 'alternative' but weird as in boring. Very, very boring. So boring that it kind of pains me to even list some of the bands and singers he approves of: Santana, Aimee Mann, Ben Folds Five, Badly Drawn Boy, The Bible, to name but a few. There are some that get a pass such as Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, and Teenage Fanclub and some that I'd not heard such as a song by The J Geils Band called First I Look At The Purse but on checking it out on YouTube my worst fears are confirmed. 

Music is a personal thing and I wouldn't say that I've got the best taste in the world when it comes to it and as the Rolling Stones sang, it's only rock'n'roll, but then as Bowie said on Diamond Dogs and somewhat applicable to Hornby's book: 'This ain't rock'n'roll, this is genocide.'

31 Songs is money for old rope, actually. It's comprised of the kind of stuff you would typically post up on Facebook not make into a book. Hornby's publisher obviously thought differently, however, and suspected on the back of Hornby's name there was going to be an audience for it. And they were right. And I know I'm not really in a position to criticise because unlike Hornby I've not sold more than 5 million copies of books worldwide but criticise I will: 31 Songs is the book-form equivalent of another nail being hammered into the coffin of music being a medium of any relevance. It's that bad.

John Serpico