One day the music critic Nick Coleman lost his hearing in one ear. This book is the response. I can’t tell you how good it is but I’ll try. Having lost something so vital, he tells us about music. What it means to him. How he feels it. And this means he gets into the question of taste — why we like what we like. It’s a superb analysis. He tells us why he never quite went for the Beatles, because the refusenik in him couldn’t quite take their urgency to please. He describes the tense, early moments of the song I Heard it Through the Grapevine — it “issues into the mind like smoke under a door”. And he tells us about his youth, too. Superb.
