Even more than most Paul Morley, a maddening mixed bag of a book, Morley, you see, has got into classical. Which means that we get him using his intermittent gift for the laser-guided description to quite correctly observe that the organ "embodies with epic, ecstatic sadness the time and space that the cathedral contains and will ultimately be engulfed by." But also that we get wince-inducing trendy vicar-isms like "Glenn Gould, who in many ways was more Iggy than Iggy". Early on, especially, there is also an attempt to position A Sound Mind as a book about how streaming has changed the consumption of music, and how that interlocks with time changing the individual's listening – though he never quite explains (and increasingly it fades out altogether) why he seems to favour Tidal, which of all the streaming services is the one that has been accused of the most grievous shenanigans against musicians other than the already ultra-successful. And yes, there probably is something to his argument that the pop record has a relation to the physical item which classical doesn't, that packaging was more integral to some of its high points – though even then, his paean to the likes of Eno's Obscure Records label seems like an obvious hole in the argument. But he's foolishly ready to fall for the myth that everything is on streaming now, when it's a rare week I don't find a gap, and he talks blithely about the death of the vinyl album, when in fact it's experiencing a revival. In general, his awareness that he's making a cliched middle-aged move with this change of allegiances doesn't stop him from sometimes coming across as the default snob convert. If Holst now sounds better than King Crimson, maybe that's less because pop and rock are dead, and more because King Crimson were always prog bobbins?

And there's the other problem with this book, for me at least: I know that King Crimson were prog bobbins. Whereas the revisionist account of classical which Morley says he's building here: is it revisionist? If so, is it good revisionism, or bad revisionism? If someone who knew more about classical than me were to read this, would they think it a sound account? If they didn't, would their objections be sound, or simply the fusty mutterings of the Man getting annoyed at that young punk Morley telling it like it is? I have no toolkit to even begin to tell you. I've definitely listened to more classical while I was reading it, so in that sense – and of course, by having me talking about Paul Morley – it's succeeded in its goals. But for all that he argues music floats free of meaning without context, 'especially pop', I find it so much more with classical, even classical I'm listening to precisely because it's been given intriguing context by this book, where my experience was often very reminiscent of the Indie Club sketch from The Fast Show – this amazing description of some weird and vast sound, followed by music which was, you know, perfectly pleasant background classical, but not something that I'm ever likely to listen to again, much less see join the list of maybe two dozen composers and pieces I recognise or with which I genuinely have any engagement. The exception being Cornelius Cardew's AMM, not because they spoke to my soul but because they were a dreadful bloody racket I turned off halfway through. Which was unfortunate because they were one of the times when Morley, writing about something else, also offered a handy review of his own style: "Much of it was static at the same time as it feverishly circled itself and headed out in new directions before tracking back." See also, on Woolf: 'This connection was always of interest to me, the idea of how you wrote about music, and transformed a piece of music into words about that piece of music when particularly a great piece of music was its own best description and explanation." And yes, his love of paradox and lists, and in particular his love of combining the two, means that a) the illustrative passages are often too long plausibly to quote and b) that it can at times devolve into 'In summary, Libya is a country of contrasts'. But there's still something fascinating in watching a man who has more or less got away with these flights of fancy for as long as I've been alive suffer occasional open pangs of impostor syndrome now he's operating in a sphere which has retained a greater tolerance for formal, technical vocab. Some of which he guides the reader through – it's good knowing what those K numbers on Mozart mean, not least because Mozart is one of my two dozen. Morley says of him that Mozart "has become one of those who will not be forgotten, because eternity recollects them" – a beautiful phrase and notion, which I've already been stealing, but this is the problem with how classical is often discussed, isn't it, whether on that annoying bit the showy driver in Pig listens to, or here – the sense that because something has been remembered this far, it will continue to be. Even if we somehow dodge the impending end of the sort of society which can sustain both orchestras and streaming sites, of how many forgotten people has something similar been said, their names now dust while we remember Ea-Nasir? There are moments when Morley seems on the verge of realising this; he talks about how music without words was in its early days seen as a new departure, a somewhat superficial form, "a kind of fancy lark" – but then he misses what's staring him in the face and concludes "Pop music, if you like", when surely the real lesson is that in regaining lyrics, returning to song, pop was music coming back to itself? Over and over, he walks that line, still enough of an outsider to admit "Recorded music perversely created a natural, human sound; to the outsider, the unfiltered, microphone-free opera singer can sound totally unnatural, somewhere between a neutered monster and a distressed fairy." But he's also worked his way far enough in to say that "the invention of opera was, in part, of imagining what heaven might be like, as an almost hysterical abstraction of our reality". Which is as good an excuse for it as I've ever heard.

Outside its big and faltering arguments, though, there were plenty of bits I enjoyed. Some of them are from more core Morley territory, as when he discusses the creative tensions and separate dominions with Horn and ZTT, or the wonderful Art of Noise slogan I'd not encountered before, "art exists because reality is neither real nor significant". I had no idea, either, that Mike Oldfield's eponymous tubular bells had been borrowed from John Cale, being the same ones used on Paris 1919. Assuming, of course, that it's actually true; when he describes Huddersfield as "the sturdy, steady West Yorkshire town that, oddly enough, was the birthplace of both the first female Doctor Who – Jodie Whittaker – and the second captain of the Starship Enterprise – Patrick Stewart" he spoils an interesting coincidence by being wrong about both roles (though SF seems like a weak spot in general, as witness the baffling description of Alien as "a coda and kind of continuation to Stanley Kubrick's 2001" and yes, they do both use classical, but really?). Still, I hope he's on surer ground regarding Huddersfield when he describes Satie, Cage and Messiaen dining together in the town's Pizza Hut, because that's such a delightfully incongruous image. And on Huddersfield's musical culture generally, and what it says about classical in general, he's excellent on the the way that the experimental end now mostly feels every bit as comfortably heritage as the old stuff, "interest in culture as more of a convivial time-passing hobby than a cause [...] it turned out that what came after modern and then postmodern was more, much more of the sam, much of it curated at fastidious annual festivals". Even if he then flips annoying again, positing it as an alternative to a pop culture in which people are just shovelling down what they're told to like, despite the fact that it's surely exactly the same thing, just operating on a smaller and less successful scale.

Still, wherever I may disagree with him, one section of the book I cannot fault in the slightest is when he gets the knives out for Classic FM, the channel/brand/blob which even I can recognise as a horrific denaturing. Its desperate grasps at relevance and accessibility, even down to pathetic gestures like losing the '-al'. "For ITV, this is the Arts. For the rest of us, it is the pimped end of the pier." He is hilariously, if unnecessarily, savage about Titchmarsh, and when he drops a reference to "the general Barlowering of musical standards" I was so impressed I could only wonder, how is this not already a pun in general use? So yeah. Even if I very much disagree with Morley's apparent defection to the baffling tribe who think there will ever come a time when more people listen to Harrison Birtwistle than Be My Baby, even if it did take me well over a year to soldier through this (and a fair bit of that as an aid to recapturing sleep, when the circular prose addressing a topic of little direct interest was ideal), I can't deny it had its moments. And Hell, it's always fun to watch Morley write his way across those tightropes, whether or not he makes it to the other side.

(Netgalley ARC)

Two books in one: a collection of inspiring, well-informed playlists of classical music; and a rambling and repetitive autobiography.
Morley's book has sparkling anecdotes, some incisive and detailed analysis of how music works and evidence of a deep and attentive listening.
The weakest aspect is its prolixity. Morley is determined to display the workings of his move from popular to classical music, a shift in taste that is far more common than he seems to realise. Here, the writing becomes so self absorbed that the material is pushed into a secondary space. The reader's interest wanes.
The book would have been more successful at half the length.

A Sound Mind (How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History) is an interesting but very wordy read.
It's a book you keep coming back to, not because you aren't enjoying it but because it's so wordy it takes a lot of concentration to read and understand the points Paul Morley is trying to convey.

Has some fantastic playlist recommendations.

I appreciated the playlists and some parts of the book but I generally struggled and found it too long.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Classical music. Elitist, stuffy and boring, right? Wrong! In this memoir and unconventional exploration of classical music, Paul Morley seeks out the avant garde, the experimental and the surprising. His taste in the more radical works is to be expected (he was a founder of cutting-edge group Art of Noise and worked with Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and he laments the sanitised, soothing playlists of Classic FM and the like.

The subtitle of this book is How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History). The author is well-known as a ‘rock critic’ but he was wondering what would be the last song he ever listened to and then realised how much music he’d been missing out on. This book explores his feelings about the composers he discovered and is packed full of recommendations, enough to keep you listening for years. It’s a very personal perspective but is informative too. He focuses on particular composers, such as Holst, Mozart, Cage and Eno. What I like the most is the idea that there are no boundaries between the different styles or genres of works, that there should be no big cultural divide between ‘classical’ and ‘pop’. It’s all music. Morley doesn’t define exactly what classical is. His writing on what are considered classical works is peppered with references to jazz, folk, rock and electronic music. Opera does have a section to itself, but I get the impression he has to work hard to love it, partly due to the ‘image problem’.

Despite the exciting ideas and playlists, I only enjoyed maybe 50% of the content of this book. Much of Morley’s writing about the music he loves is very wordy indeed. Whenever it got abstract and repetitive, I ended up skim-reading until I reached some music history or an interview or something that I actually understood. Occasionally, I feared that I wasn’t intelligent enough to understand what he was talking about, which ties in to the fear that many people have that they can’t listen to classical music because they don’t know or understand it. If you’re looking for an introduction to classical music, particularly the avant garde, then I don’t recommend this book, as the names, musical terms and descriptions won’t mean much unless you already have some knowledge and listening experience. If you want something more thought-provoking and are prepared for the wordiness, then give it a go.

[Review will be published on my blog on October 3rd]

I’m afraid I struggled with A Sound Mind. Paul Morley says some interesting things and makes some valid points, but oh dear – he does go on. And on. And on.

The subtitle of the book gives a clear idea of the content. It’s the story of how Morley began to develop an interest in and then a love for classical music, having been a rock critic for decades. There are some interesting observations, especially as I (like many others, I suspect) have made a similar move toward classical music as I have aged. He is very acute, too, on things like the universal, instant accessibility of huge amounts of music and how it means that we probably value it less than when an album was a significant investment of pocket money. But…

All of this is almost submerged in a deluge of self-referential verbiage. Quite early on, Morley actually talks about rock critics’ “compulsion to use too many words,” but apparently without any self-awareness, because it certainly applies here. He makes the error of assuming that all his readers are as fascinated as he is by every nuance of the development of his emotional and intellectual response to classical music. I’m afraid that this reader wasn’t and this, along with some clumsy and almost incomprehensible semi-metaphorical ramblings about plane journeys and the like made the whole thing very hard going for me. (And if I read one more sentence with endless lists of “from Haydn to Bowie, from Webern to [insert name of obscure band]….” I will not be responsible for my actions. OK, Paul, we get it – you’ve listened to a lot of music.)

At well over 600 pages, I suspect that this would have been a much better book if it had been half the length. There are quite a lot of interesting and penetrating observations here, but finding them is a real effort. I think the book is summed up for me in this little quote: “...the prog-rock concept album, with its own bloated, self-involved aesthetic that needed urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by punk rock”. He is, as so often, absolutely right, but can’t seem to see that his own book is just as bloated and self-involved and needs urgent, almost therapeutic puncturing by a good, strong editor. I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)