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).