Lost in Music - Giles Smith

I wish I’d never looked at Giles Smith’s picture before I read this. If you decide to purchase this book yourselves forget about the back cover and just remember that it cost £5.99 and DON’T LOOK. His image gave me a voice in my head that I didn’t need to have, slightly Northern, slightly Morrissey and quite monotonous. The photo’s pensive and too contrived and his hair is reminiscent of Richard Madeley: shiny and flicked. He looks like a Kenny G fan, so I’ve been trying to read this as if it were written by Bukowski or Mishima which certainly helped matters ... more

A book that is tremendously annoying in the sense that as a music fan you wish you'd written it first. Giles Smith's comfortable, easy writing style takes you through his life with popular music; listening to it, buying it, obsessing over it, and finally attempting to play it in public for money. Along the way he goes through such pivotal moments as buying your first single (and lying about what it was years later), realising that Dark Side Of The Moon is rubbish, discovering that a music fan can't lose his virginity with the record player on, being compelled to buy everything Nik Kershaw ... more