The road not taken | 25 October 2018

In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first picked up an instrument, the UK record business was a very different place. There were five weekly music papers — NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and Disc. Around 15 million people tuned into Top of the Pops every Thursday; Radio 1 reached more than 20 million listeners a week, and chart 45s could sell 500,000 copies. Today, the idea of schoolchildren saving up their pocket money to buy the latest single feels as if it has long since gone the way of other formerly popular activities such as stamp collecting and origami. The times, as Dylan almost remarked, they’ve been a-changin’.

‘As a teenager, I wanted to do two things,’ says Kermode. ‘To become a pop star, and to watch movies.’ These days he is best known as a film critic — a career he explored in a previous autobiographical volume, It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (2010). But his entertaining new book is a wry memoir devoted to four decades of mostly failing to fulfil that other youthful ambition. It was not for want of trying.

Others in the past have felt the need to choose between two divergent potential careers: in the 1790s, the future Duke of Wellington burnt his violin to concentrate on military matters. Kermode, however, has pursued a dual path, and his growing fame as a critic sometimes gave him television exposure for his music. As he points out, a fair few examples of this have surfaced on YouTube, but sadly, no one seems to have had a camera handy in the mid 1980s when Mark’s Manchester University group Hopeless (formerly Herpes One Hundred) treated an audience of students to a rousing version of ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks, coughing up fake blood from capsules they had been chewing: ‘The floor was awash with slimy red drool, a sea of sticky nastiness.’