BOOKS

Rip It Up, Issue 230, 1 October 1996, Page 34

BOOKS

LOST IN MUSIC _ Giles Smith (Picador: paperback) I feel as if I spent as much time reading Lost in Music aloud to other people and demanding every person I saw while I was reading it read it after me as I did reading it myself. Now that I have finished reading my copy, I am not willing to risk being parted from it, so you’ll all have to buy your own — and you definitely should. It’s a bellringing book for pop kids, pop journalists, pop stars, pop failures, the parents of pop offspring who wonder why the hell their kids need to spend so much time in the bathroom (they’re practising pop moves in front of the mirror, I tell you) among other things... hell, anyone who has even heard the word pop is sure find a fair whack of hoots in here (prime examples include Nick Kershaw on Top of the Pops, how to forget you ever owned an album by ‘the Pina Colada Song’ man, Rupert Holmes, much talk about serial album cataloguing, how to get a CD out of its sleeve, the benefits of speaker stands, copper speaker wires, and other such fundamentally anal quandaries you haye probably secretly worried about). Lost in Music takes a view of pop most people will share, but would never come out and talk about for fear of becoming unpopular among their peers. Although Giles Smith, is not really famous (unless you’re the sort of person who is prone to mobbing journalists on the street — and I haven’t met too many of those),'and didn’t really cut the mustard at his first choice of career (he thought Sting’s job might have been quite a nice one), he deserves to achieve both fame and recognition of talent for this book. He introduces it as a story of one man’s journey into rock and then back to his mum’s. It’s el journey that began with the purchase of his first single — Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ (although, if you’d asked him, he would have probably told you it was ‘Let it Be’ by the Beatles), and ends in the present day with a heart-in-mouth declaration of thirty-some-thing values that takes the hero we have come to know and love (okay, recognise and be embarrassed for) to the very edge of a slag heap we might just have to dump him in, before saving him with a hoorah in the last line. Lost.in Music is worth throwing away a good number of the books you

have read about pop music to make room on the shelf for — honest, thorough, and frequently hilarious, it sets out to entertain you in the most direct way possible (a lot like a pop song really), and achieves it aim to the tune of 277 pages. Smith deserves to have his first chart hit with this baby — in other words, it should succeed where Pony, the Orphans of Babylon and the Cleaners From Venus (bands whose first-hand stories you can also read within these pages) did not. BRONWYN TRUDGEON ELVIS —THE COLLECTABLE Simon Templeton (Hodder Moa Beckett — hardcover) So, you bought an Elvis souvenir felt skirt back in 58. Wow! What a find, the fash’ of the day, and with a print of the King strummin’ an’ singin’. It should be, to you, a reminder of the good days gone, bobby sox and innocence, and by sweet Jesus, you should keep that skirt. But if you don’t want to keep it, there are a few people who sure would like it. The Elvis-print felt skirt, retail price in 1958: SUS2.9B, is now getting SUSI,OOO-1,200. That’s just for the skirt — what about the collection of Sun singles, the souvenir hair and body products, or the various era action figures? All fetching prices once only Elvis himself could have afforded. Simon Templeton’s Elvis — The Collectable is an attractive yet strange volume. Comprehensive, well presented with excellent photos, yet for me it aroused a sense of sadness and melancholy. These items, their original worth and their market price today, are all the residue of the cynical marketeers’ response to idol worship at its most fervent (much blame must go to Colonel Tom, who really did kill the goose that laid the golden eggs). One cannot argue with the kids for buying this stuff. They loved Elvis and wanted anything with his name on it. But now it’s all the realm of Japanese investors and Texan billionaires. Still, it’s an interesting look at stardom of the past. Nowadays we think over-commercialism is a T-shirt and a video. Imagine if we marketed modern musicians in the same way — instead of Elvis sneakers and army dog-tags, there were Kurt Cobain hypodermics and authentic Art Alexakis souvenir sob stories about his brother... Are we

better or worse now?

JESSE GARON