This is the memoir of an anonymous pop picker, covering two decades from his birth in the early 60s at the outbreak of Beatlemania. It's a different kind of music history, discussing what records actually did to people, not what posterity often claims they did. Being a memoir, it enables us to follow the specific strands of his experience as a continuous narrative. Being anonymous, it enables us to generalise about his outlook and responses, as well as all the background scenery, making it representative as well as personal.
So: what did a three-year old think of those classic Beatles records? What did an unclouded infant response to the Supremes or Donavan look like? How might you deal with lyrics concerning yearning feelings, navel-rubies and detachable mountains, when your vocabulary bank has only just opened for business? Adults can say one thing and feel another - all a pre-school child has is words and tunes, and a relationship with a world almost entirely guided by them.
The story covers his early interactions with these fascinating, alluring discs and the heavy machinery they were played on, the way that teenagers and adults responded to contemporary late-60s hits, and how different those that sang them looked on television, compared to the images provided by the records.
The narrative moves through glam and the rock 'n' roll revival. It covers punk, with its alarming implications, the puzzling enthusiasm shown for it by trusted adults and the fact that it then became new wave (which was much better). There's disco, there's prog, there's new romanticism and lots of irresistible novelty. There are healthy doses of church, folk and classical music mixed in. It chronicles the attention paid to the singles chart, from a dim awareness of relative performances to the seriousness of special record's mounting an assault on the number one position. It covers the heartache of realising that your favourite record will be at number two. It covers the heartache of realising that Kate Bush will never be your girlfriend.
Someone born in the early 60s is lucky. They were a teenager in that richly inventive post-punk period, with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, Abba and Boney M, Parallel Lines and Dare. It was the period when guitars were eclipsed by synths and when the sounds underpinning disco dissolved and re-congealed, taking the shapes of 80s soul. And it was the period when the seven-inch single was selling in quantities not seen before or since.
