Quick Reads: Music to Make Friends by - A Life Loving Pop Music

Music to Make Friends By is one of this year’s additions to the wonderful Quick Reads series, which continues to be supported by the Welsh Government. Books in the series are designed to get readers back into the swing of reading, and reading for pleasure. There is short fiction commissioned from well-known authors; the tales of celebrities, sports men and women, and adventurers; and the true-life stories of ordinary people who have faced difficult, and sometimes tragic, situations. They are short books that offer entertainment and inspiration, and which therefore appeal to a wide readership. In Music to Make Friends By, award-winning author Hayley Long explores her life-long love of music, tracking the story back through the decades to the 1970s, when she was growing up in a house full of music – her mother’s black-vinyl singles, her father’s LPs, and her own very first purchase, at the age of nine, from the record department of Woolworths in Ipswich: ‘What was the first record you ever bought? I wish now I could say it was something by Blondie or David Bowie or Adam and the Ants. If I ever have said that I was lying. The truth is actually a little less hip.’ Long writes with warmth and humour about her changing taste in music over the years, and the huge role music has played in her life. For anyone of the same generation or older, the book will trigger a host of memories, not just of individual singers and bands, but of the ways in which we heard and bought and learned about music in a pre-digital world: Sunday evening’s Top 40 countdown and The Annie Nightingale Show on Radio 1; pirate radio stations like Laser 558; the record departments of Woolworths and Smiths, together with a plethora of small independent record shops run and staffed by people with a passion for music; Smash Hits and NME and fanzines. At the age of eleven, Long and a friend set up their own school branch of The Madness Fan Club, designing and producing their own fanzine with nothing more than a box of felt-tip pens. Individual singers, bands, albums and tracks are significant way-markers: Long and her friend Noz working together in a shoe shop and putting on The Smiths’ single ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ very loudly to drive customers out if the shop got too busy; an early boyfriend ending the relationship by giving Long Nirvana’s album Nevermind; hearing Marlena Shaw’s ‘Let’s Wade in the Water’ for the first time in a bar in Spain; finding her kind of people at uni by putting The Zombies’ 'She’s Not There' on the jukebox at the Central Hotel in Aberystwyth. Music to Make Friends By is a wonderful journey through all types of music, from big names we all recognise to the obscure bands that played at the Students’ Union during Long’s university days – ‘The fans of Lawnmower Deth [sic] were mostly very pale boys who looked like they needed a hot bath and a meal.’ It’s a great read. And when I reached the end, I got ‘Let’s Wade in the Water’ up on YouTube and danced around the kitchen. How lovely that a book can make you explore new music and get up and dance! ~Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com