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.’

An award-winning poet and radio dramatist, Greenlaw has a gift for creating maximum impact in just a few words. There were several moments while reading The Importance of Music to Girls when I felt as if I had been hit in the stomach. As 14-year-old punks she and her friend cut their hair with kitchen scissors, only Lavinia is more drunk than her friend and keeps on cutting even after Cara begins to acquire bald patches on either side. ‘At school, girls cackled behind their hands while boys roared. Cara did not react.’ But later that night Cara goes home and takes an overdose of her father’s pills.

Greenlaw grew up on a literary diet of Russian novels and American poetry but with music she was more adventurous, abandoning her parents’ classical LPs and love of madrigals for Radio Caroline and the disco.