Hornby's on song

WHEN people ask Nick Hornby what music he likes, he says he finds it difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and he can give them only song titles. Such imprecision might irritate the every spit-and-cough authors of Abba, Thank You For The Music, The Smiths, Songs That Saved Your Life and The Encyclopaedia Of Classic 80s Pop, and yet Hornby's intimacy with his favoured songs in 31 Songs (Penguin, hardback, £12.99) goes beyond factual detail into the realm of original thought, personal reflection and candid comment.

All four are list books, much in the way that Rob Fleming, Hornby's anti-hero in his novel High Fidelity, was one for keeping lists, such as his favourite Elvis Costello numbers (my pick of his top fives).

Costello's canon does not feature among the 31 Songs, but then this is not Hornby's playlist of the 31 Best Songs... Ever from his record collection.

Instead this series of essays on music by the former pop critic of the New Yorker is a choice of songs he loves or once loved, each significant to him.

Those songs, from an enduring affair with Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road to a flirtatious dalliance with Nelly Furtado's Fly Like A Bird, are a springboard for a discussion point.

Hornby does not seek out the story behind the song, in the manner of the three other books, but instead psychoanalyses what reactions they spark and why. He is not interested in the geology, nor the genealogy, but the chemistry and the biology.

His voice is not only more mature but wiser too than in his first journalistic prose work, the confessions of a football fan in Fever Pitch, but the peppery humour is undimmed. As with Fever Pitch, his original piece of cultural friction not fiction, his style is anecdotal and intimate, if increasingly irascible the more this slim autobiographical volume progresses.

Pop makes him snap and crackle in this homogenous age of the ultra-planned, ultra-bland band, not because of a lack of tunes but because it is so difficult to keep a song personal.

That remains his gift: his confessions are wholly his own and yet they trigger universal feelings that in turn lead off into personal responses. Just like Fever Pitch, you can foresee 31 Songs spawning a spate of 31 More Songs, and none of the acolytes will write so wittily yet persuasively about the redeeming qualities of Rod Stewart pre-Britt Ekland days; or de-construct the Dylan aficianado so uncannily; or make a case for Ian Dury's Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 to be the new English National Anthem with such affection, yet wrap it inside a tirade against England today.

Hornby's tone has become so assured - the uncertainty of a first book has long gone - that for the first time, there is a loss of humility and occasionally an academic dryness of tone in his mid-40s.

However, those of a similar age, those who engage with both Aimee Mann and Royksopp and have found a new quiet corner of contentment in American alt.country, will warm once more to Hornby's trains of thought. Particularly if, like Hornby, they are still not ready for jazz.

Robert Scott's Abba, Thank You For The Music (Carlton Books, £16.99), is a suitably camp and catty album-by-album, track-by-track school report, full of gossip and fashion faux pas photos too, although his turn of phrase is prone to clich.

Another biography in song order, Simon Goddard's The Smiths, Songs That Saved Your Life (Reynolds & Hearn, £10.99), is as serious and reverential as that title suggests. Definitive too, with Goddard making the most of his access to the wry Mancunian misfits' studio archives and drummer Mike Joyce's private collections.

The Smiths are granted four pages out of 502 in The Encyclopaedia Of Classic 80s Pop (Allison & Busby, hardback, £12.99), Daniel Blythe's playful scrapbook of trivia and snapshot profiles from that flashy era. Lively, nostalgic, tongue in cheek, it could however be more withering. One for the quizzical and quiz compilers.

Updated: 08:54 Wednesday, April 02, 2003