Granta 76: Music (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing) - Softcover

Blithely ignore the dictum (usually attributed to Elvis Costello) that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", Granta 76: Music is all about music. The range of musical styles tackled by the contributors is wide--from New Orleans Bounce Rap and Debussy to Bob Dylan and Kathleen Ferrier--though curiously no one has chosen to write about jazz. (There is Richard Williams' excellent piece on Frank Sinatra's mob-funded hotel, the Cal-Neva, but that hardly counts.) The most apposite, if a little trite, way to view this collection is perhaps as a kind of literary version of the compilation tape. (Nick Hornby, no stranger to chronicling the delights of homespun C90s, writes about them again here.) Compilation tapes, like the swathes of anthologies or "Greatest Hits" packages available, usually have a distinct whiff of nostalgia about them. The majority of articles in Granta 76: Music are autobiographical but thankfully they (largely) manage to steer clear of misty-eyed reflection or sentimentality. Andrew O'Hagan, for example, movingly pays tribute to his aunt Famie and her favourite song "Cecilia"; while Craig Brown resurrects the odd moment from his childhood when "Gin gan gooly" suddenly made more sense than "I am the Walrus (goo-goo-ga joo)" and Blake Morrison reveals that years before "The Sisters of Mercy" his Yorkshire adolescence was blighted by the original gothic monstrosity "On Ilkley Moor Baht Tat". This volume is not without its "I'll just fast forward that" moments (Philip Hensher's gauche and flabby "Brandy" for one) but with such delights as Greil Marcus' profile of the American Folk archivist Harry Smith and Julie Burchill explaining why she never wants to hear Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" again, it's more "Blood on the Tracks" than "Self-Portrait". --Travis Elborough

Ian Jack edited Granta from 1995 to 2007, having previously edited the Independent on Sunday. He has written on many subjects, including the Titanic, Kathleen Ferrier, the Hatfield train crash and the three members of the IRA active-service unit who were killed on Gibraltar. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of India, and the author of a collection of journalism, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. He lives in London and now writes for the Guardian.