For me it was "Lullaby of the Leaves" by Gerry Mulligan. Actually, I am proud of it. It now sounds like movie music but Mulligan has kept his street cred. For Giles Smith it was the Beatles' "Let it be". Except that it wasn't. It was "Rosetta" by Georgie Fame, but memory has blanked out the horror of it all.
We are talking, of course, "the first record I ever bought", one of those seminal conversations that you have when letting the hair down and loosening the tie. In his very amusing book Lost in Music, Giles Smith traces his pop odyssey. He admits that he convinced himself for years that his first commitment to pop was buying the Beatles record when it was actually acquiring a pale imitation of the Sixties sound.
He confesses much else in this apologia of a pop junkie: the ruthless purge of his records before going to university, consigning Status Quo and Supertramp to the back of the wardrobe; the abandonment of all his ideals by buying CD versions of his favourite vinyl albums; the relentless pursuit of anything connected with XTC.
These are not the meanderings of yet another wasted youth. Giles Smith is not a complete amateur. He actually flirted with the professional side of pop. He was half of The Cleaners From Venus, which were big -- well, almost big -- in Germany. He cut an album; he toured. The encounter with real pop managers, real record executives, ensures that his story is that much more heart-rending than the sad fantasies of a million lads who at any one time are in a band.
What makes it irresistable, giving it almost a Pooterish naivety and making it a natural for early morning serialisation during the Parliamentary recess, is the niceness of it all. If drugs and groupies dog the stars, they left the Cleaners well alone. The high spot of the German tour was a glass of real orange juice. This is as much the story of a happy childhood in Colchester as a saga of the infamies of the pop world. Smith is incapable of malice: he admits that he signed a terrible contract so that he could fondle a piece of vinyl that carried his name.
Being smitten by pop in Colchester in the 1970s was a forlorn experience. But suddenly, in the 1990s, that part of Essex produced Blur. In a typically deprecating anecdote, Damon Albarn, the lead singer from Blur, comes with his parents to the Smith family home for Christmas drinks and joins Smith's mother in some carol singing. "Utterly predictable, of course" writes Smith "that when someone from my family finally got to duet with a chart-topping pop hero it was my mother".
In shining contrast to all the bombastic, overblown, self-serving books about pop, Lost in Music has the ring of truth, the sweetness of innocence. And Smith is still hopelessly enraptured. On the last page the Cleaners are re-forming, Japan beckons. Can Smith, a now a 32-year-old journalist with a lawnmower and a worrying liking for jazz, join the tour? "`When are the rehearsals?', I said."
Lost in Music
by Giles Smith
Picador UKP 12.99, 277 pages
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