Review: In My Life: A Music Memoir, by Alan Johnson

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

HAD TS Eliot come of age in the 1950s rather than half a century earlier chances are he would have measured out his life not with coffee spoons but with hit records. Alan Johnson, a postman who metamorphosed into a politician, was born in 1950 and is thus a child of the golden era of rock and roll. His life, we are told in this fourth instalment of autobiography, has reverberated to the sound of music invented in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1957, when he was seven, he was listening to Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio when True Love, sung by Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, was played. It was, he recalls, one of his mother Lily’s best-loved songs. “‘For you and I have a guardian angel on high with nothing to do,’ Bing and Grace sang. A guardian angel for Lily would certainly not have been under-occupied. Her hard life was soon to become much harder as her health deteriorated and she struggled to cope without her feckless husband.” In hindsight, as we soon learn, True Love marked the eclipse of one kind of music by another that was much less gentle and much more raucous.

Readers of Johnson’s previous memoirs will recognise familiar terrain. His is the story of a boy who grew up poor, cared for principally by his elder sister Linda, and went on to become a trades union leader and Cabinet minister. But it might have been very different. As he relates in In My Life, Johnson’s first love was music and he yearned to follow in the Chelsea-booted footsteps of his idols, The Beatles. Hard up his mother may have been and often, quite literally, on the breadline, but she did manage somehow to buy him a guitar. Though it was not much cop it led her young son to believe he might have a career as a strummer.

The 1950s were very different from the decade that succeeded it. Elvis may have been the cause of palpitations across the Bible Belt but Britain was still largely in thrall to crooners. I recall buying for my own mother’s Christmas a version of Scarlet Ribbons, as sweet and sickly a ballad as it’s possible to imagine, performed by a polo-necked Val Doonican. Mention his name in polite company today and watch as your audience beats a dramatic retreat. Hereabouts one of the first to cotton on to what was happening on the other side of the pond was Cliff Richard who was more of an attraction to Linda than he was to eight-year-old Alan. Cliff, writes the man once touted as Labour’s antidote to Jeremy Corbyn, was “basically an Elvis Presley tribute act”. This is the kind of seemingly innocuous remark that can easily you lose an election.

Johnson devotes a chapter to each year of his life up to 1982 when, he says, music didn’t die for him but when, he admits, he bought Billy Joel’s album The Nylon Curtain on compact audio cassette. Its standout track, our DJ insists, was called Allentown, which was “as profound a comment” on the decline of American industry “as anything Bruce Springsteen ever wrote”. It’s as this point that I realised that Johnson and I, though of a similar vintage, could not spend too long in the same room without bashing each over the head with a drum stick. Never again will I hope to see Springsteen and Joel mentioned the same paragraph. In the great debate over who is cool and who is uncool, Johnson is, I’m afraid to say, found too often on the wrong side of the argument. For example, while he admires Bob Dylan – and who but a deaf-eared dolt doesn’t? – he seems not to have a clue as to what he’s about. Dylan, he insists, has never been quite as good as he was on Bringing It All Back Home, released in 1965. Perhaps – let’s be generous – he has never heard Blonde on Blonde (1966) or Blood on the Tracks (1975). Then, as Johnson writes, Dylan for him was “our gentle poet”. Dylan should sue.

Taste, of course, is in the ear of the listener. As Johnson daunders through the years, combining personal history – courting girls, working in supermarkets, playing in bands (“My pièce de resistance...was The Troggs’ Wild Thing”) – with global events such as the Cuban missile crisis (“I was blissfully unaware of any sense of impending doom”), he delves into his musical memory, replaying the hits and misses that made an indelible impression on him. It’s a wallow in nostalgia and none the worse for it. Johnson is a fan not a critic and his comments are rarely insightful. What he does convey is enthusiasm of a sort that made growing up in the post-war decades such fun.

In the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon sang, every generation sends a new hero up the pop charts. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, new heroes appeared weekly on Top of the Pops. Moreover, because of the available technology everyone irrespective of how many pounds they had in their pocket listened simultaneously to the same songs and could immediately compare verdicts. We knew where and when we were when the Beatles released their first LP. When in 1969 they played Get Back on a rooftop in central London it was in the Six O’Clock News. Johnson remembers the day John Lennon was murdered as we all do. Unlike the accidental death of Buddy Holly twenty-one years earlier, Lennon’s demise was a sign not that music had died but that innocence had. Or, at the least, the innocence those of us had who grew up waiting to see what the four Liverpudlians would do next. Like Dylan, they did not look back. But that doesn’t mean we lesser mortals can’t. Not the least pleasure of reading In My Life is that it encouraged me to compile my own playlist which, I was not entirely surprised to find, includes any number of acts – Mamas & Papas, Fleetwood Mac, Nice, Van the Man, Marc Bolan, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Pentangle, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen – not name-checked by Alan Johnson. Which would be all very well and understandable but for his championing of Billy Joel. There’s no excusing that.