The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss (Paperback)

This is a book for anyone who grew up with pop music, listens to it still and has spent too much time thinking about it and talking about it. But it’s also a book about love and loss and middle age and looming mortality, written with grace and the driest imaginable humour. I’m not sure I can recommend it highly enough A deft and heartfelt exploration of music, silence, adolescence, English pop and the emotional consequences of serious illness, and above all a discussion of something modern culture has very nearly lost touch with - the idea, and the desirability, of taste. In a story told with warmth, wit, candour and dry, self-deprecating humour and without a whiff of self-pity... Coleman is insightful and convincing in his musings on music's emotional impact, funny in his recollections of the pains of growing up and sharp in his analysis of the thorny issue of musical 'taste' Coleman is a spirited person, who writes with an irresistible Hornby-esque skip in his style... funny and admirable A beautiful, elegiac ballad. Coleman writes elegantly and movingly of his youth, of growing up and of his intimate relationship with an art form that has shaped his memories