HOW many times can some people cite Astral Weeks and Blonde on Blonde as pivotal musical influences in their youth? Yes, and how many times can they say that Songs of Love and Hale and Sgt Pepper's were spinning around the Dansette as life's rich tapestry unfolded? The answer, my friend, is lying within the pages of this compendium of musical reminiscences by Irish and Irish-related personages.
The demographics of the contributors reflect the fact that the children of the Sixties were the first to experience the cultural impact of popular music - it would be difficult to state a case for Glen, Miller's effect on the Zeitgeist - and as such there's many a statement of the "when I first heard Elvis/The Beatles/Dylan, my life was never the same again" variety.
The editor's original idea was, that the contributors, who ranged from Rhonda Paisley to Nell McCafferty and B.R Fallon to Danny Morrison, would submit a list of albums that most influenced them and provided the soundtrack to their lives. Thankfully, a lot of the contributors ignored this stricture and opted for free-flowing, rambling narratives that, at their best, enlighten and entertain.
In the preface, one of the editors uses the quote "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" (wrongly attributed to David Bowie here; it was said by Elvis Costello), and indeed the best writing is done by those who ignore tortuous analyses of four/ four beats and middle eights and instead use a piece of music to merely indicate a specific date when something far more interesting was happening in their lives.
This attitude is neatly summed up by Mary Kenny, when she opens her contribution with: "I was too left wing to be interested in rock music when I \vas young during the Sixties" (these days she's probably an expert). In an astonishing piece of writing, she manages to weave together Gramsci, Charles Aznavour, Kurt Weill and Judy Garland into a coherent whole. Mary Coughlan offers up a more orthodox, but no less worthy, piece in which she recounts how she had to escape from her house when she was 13 to go and see a Rory Gallagher concert, and later on how seeing the film Lady Sings the Blues turned her into a Billie Holiday groupie - "I got my hands on all her albums and for a period of two years I used to listen to nothing else, I used to go in and out of moods and I found listening to her very cathartic."
The expected names largely tell the expected stories about the expected albums (note: travelling through America and listening to Bob Dylan is not interesting in itself), but there's some real fun to be found in unexpected sources - Sinn Fein's Danny Morrison writes about Bjork: "I buy, from the prison tuckshop, Debut by my Icelandic beauty and I walk the exercise yard singing Venus As A Boy and Come To Me and it is generally believed that I've flown over.
Itugo Hamilton displays a near encyclopaedic knowledge of music and is one of the few contributors to talk about music produced in the six years of this decade. He alone seems to recognise that Nick Cave has as much cultural import as any Sixties hippy.
There is some fine writing here but the editors would have done better by approaching a broader range of contributors, people whose knowledge of music (and, in some cases, ability to write) didn't calcify at the end of the Sixties. In this regard, the last word goes to Paolo Tullio, who is unidentified in the notes on contributors. He writes: "I'm going to make a prediction. What this book will turn out to be is a history of an era that is coming to an end. The music that we define as Classic Rock is fast approaching its best-before date."