Bringing It All Back Home
Ian Clayton Route, 272pp, £12.99
ISBN 1901927334
This memoir by the writer and broadcaster Ian Clayton describes a life immersed in music. The title, Bringing It All Back Home, pays homage to the seminal 1965 Bob Dylan album, while the avant-garde musician Robert Wyatt contributes a foreword. Clayton explains that he wanted to create "a map that charts a journey from a back street in the Yorkshire coalfields to the Mississippi Delta, to the Ganges Valley, to a jazz bar in Germany and back home again where I belong".
The result is a fascinating and thoughtful narrative that reveals how the author's passion for music has enriched and shaped his life. Clayton relates how he became an avid record collector after the breakdown of his parents' marriage. The records he listened to as a boy later inspired a pilgrimage through the Deep South, during which he visited the room where Bessie Smith died and juggled walnuts in front of Muddy Waters's house. In a funny yet poignant style, he describes meetings with musicians such as Van Morrison and his relationship with his grandparents.
This is a moving memoir that stirs our deepest feelings of nostalgia. We get only glimpses of the author's history, but through these highly personal memories, constantly resonant with music, he has somehow bared all.
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