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Friday 5 December 2008

The Importance of Music to Girls

Tunes of a misspent youth

Lavinia Greenlaw’s clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers (a misogynistic group who believe that an obsession with pop and rock is strictly for boys) is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies to the accompaniment of T. Rex and War’s ‘Me and My Baby Brother’. Music, she writes, has shaped her life since she was old enough to stand up and dance:

My father must have hummed a tune as I stood on his shoes and he waltzed me, but what I remember are the giant steps I was suddenly making … the world pulled and shoved while I lurched and stretched.

Greenlaw appears to have been lurching against obstacles and stretching the rules ever since. At four, she fell off a slide while sucking on a bamboo garden cane. ‘ “That cane was lodged very close to your brain,” my mother later said.’ Her brother added, ‘It’s why people shoot themselves that way.’

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