Lost in Music
Giles Smith
Picador hbk, 277 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

In the parlance, this is best described as a bloke book. That's not to say women are immune to such small scale tragedy, but as Smith notes, there was a time when every boy - and none of the girls - in Colchester seemed to be in a band.

Lost In Music is the memoir of boy pop obsessive/failed star Giles Smith. Now he can be found gracing the hallowed pages of Q, Mojo and Vogue, but in the 70s he was more likely to be found loitering on a street corner in his native Colchester looking for Marc Bolan - "Not that Marc Bolan lived in Colchester. He came from Hackney and he had no connection that I knew with the town, or any reason to be shopping there on a Saturday... But I kept my eyes peeled, just in case." Smith was a fan.

What he writes will mean everything for others similarly afflicted. The others who constructed elaborate filing systems for their record collections; who agonise over CD diminishing the pleasure of the 12" vinyl sleeve; haunted record fairs like a junkie after their XTC-fix, snatching at every ninth-generation bootleg ("recorded by someone pressing a cheap Dictaphone up against the venue's outside wall"); even flipped through record shop stock just to confirm their favourites are there ("'Yep, here's Scritti Politti's 'Cupid And Psyche'. In front of the board saying Scritti Politti. In the S section.'") It's as familiar as it is pathetic.

But Smith also stepped over the line. He was one of the ones tempted to make the transition from consumer to originator, and much of the book is taken with his stumbling efforts at celebrity in bands from Pony to The Cleaners From Venus. Briefly - very briefly - The Cleaners were moderately big in Germany, but you will delve long and deep to unearth an LP.

Why does it matter? Obviously it doesn't. At all. Smith is no more significant than any one of thousands who have exercised pogroms against their Rupert Holmes LPs in an otherwise studiously cool collection; or limped off to university with every piece of axle-bending vinyl they own; or attempted to shamefacedly explain away a brief flirtation with cred-busting local hero Nik ("we knew him before the 'c' fell off") Kershaw.

What makes it matter is that Smith is able to write about it all in such lucid, faintly embarrassed and often very funny terms. Sure a lot was silly, but that's addiction - addiction to having, to owning double 7" packs, coloured vinyl, extra tracks in Spanish. Lost In Music is as much a self-help book, a how-to manual as it is confession. Even by the end, when the author is a journalist hanging with Phil Collins and his idol Stevie Wonder, the fan is still there. He's either a good liar or stardom really holds no illusions. Mind you, at the beginning he tells us he really wanted was to apply for the post of Sting. By the end you realise he's still waiting by his letterbox for the application form. Even being Sting has its advantages. Smith's book is thoroughly recommended to the buff in everyone.