The Guardian | 30.04.22 | SATURDAY | 67Smith reads Orton and Halliwell’s actions as a
kind of queer performance art. They were not vandals
or, at least, that is not all they were. The books
they roughed up were mass-produced and easily
replaced – this was not the literary equivalent
of drawing moustaches on old masters. Rather, the
men were engaged in a protest a gainst the relentlessly
middle-brow, heteronormative pap on off er to the
citizens of Islington. Within a couple of years ,
Orton wrote Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane, the
avant garde plays that shook up a British theatre
that was already bored with the kitchen sink dramas
of the late 1950s. Still, Orton believed that the reason
he and Halliwell were sentenced to six months’
imprisonment was because they were gay at a time
when homosexuality was illegal. The Daily Express
reported, on the same page as the Orton–Halliwell
book trial, that a drunken driver who had killed his
passenger received the same sentence as the book
vandals of Essex Road.W
HEN MUDDLE-HEADED
puritans worried about the
“poison” that Orton and Halliwell
were releasing into the body
politic they were drawing on
ancient terrors about the book as
a vector of disease. As late as 1907, public health
authorities decreed that any volume from a household
recently visited by smallpox, cholera or tuberculosis
should be disinfected, if not destroyed, for fear that
it might carry contamination far and wide. Smith is
quick to see a parallel here with the early days of the
pandemic, when government guidelines warned that
books that had been bought online should be
quarantined for 72 hours before being deemed safe
to handle.
How thrilling, then, to learn that this principle
can also work the other way round. Smith explains
that ancient volumes are now being harvested
for accumulated DNA – skin cells and traces of nasal
mucus from sneezes – left behind by early readers.
At one level this allows us to glimpse people from
the past as they lean over a particular volume :
the detritus from a 1637 American Bible recently
revealed the DNA of a northern European reader who
suff ered from acne. More therapeutically, plans are in
play to swab old books to gather genetic material
that pre dates modern medical problems such as
antibiotic resistance.
Portable Magic is a love song to the book as a physical
object. In tactile prose Smith reminds us of the
thrills and spills of shabby covers, the illicit delight of
writing in margins when you have been told not to and
the guilty joy that comes from po ring over traces left
by someone else. It is these haptic, visceral and even
slightly seedy pleasures of “bookhood” that she brings
so brilliantly to life.
To buy a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.comJ
ude Rogers’s The Sound of Being
Human begins in January 1984.
She is fi ve years old and standing
at the front door of her parents’ house
in south Wales. Her father is about
to leave for what should be a routine
hospital surgery. He’ll be gone for fi ve
days – a lifetime for someone that
young. Like him – because of him – she
loves pop radio. The new Top 40 will
be announced the following day. “Let
me know who gets to No 1,” he says.
He died, just 33 , a couple of days later.
Years go by, decades. Often, at
moments she can’t anticipate, in
ways she can’t grasp, she fi nds herself
pulled up short, lonely. Music becomes
a crutch for Rogers. A community –
or at least a notion of one. She thinks
about the songs she and her father
shared. The songs they might have
shared. In pop she discovers father
fi gures, fantasies of escape, ways
to feel less unmoored. She grew up
in small towns before the era of
the internet. Pop seemed miraculous
then, a kind of abduction. She chances
on a copy of Smash Hits – all funfair
colours and splashy exclamation
marks – in a local newsagent: “It lifted
me above the red-tops, the black-and-
blue Biros, the duplicate receipts
books, the faded toys on the carousel,
the sun-blasted birthday cards, the
old boxes of penny sweets.” She
progresses to buying REM bootleg
tapes from a grimy record fair held in
a hotel showroom “next to the market
that sold polystyrene pots of cockles
and laverbread ”.
Later, Rogers starts writing aboutmusic for the Llanelli Star, much-
missed fanzine Smoke: A London
Peculiar and the Word magazine
(started by former Smash Hits editors).
She’s not interested in hyping up the
new, new thing or in being cool – she
likes Yazz as much as Atari Teenage
Riot , Kylie Minogue as much as Boards
of Canada. Her sentences are warm,
enthusiastic hugs from a much-missed
friend. She recalls throwing a pair of
knickers (with her phone number on)
at Jarvis Cocker, dancing all night to
Kraftwerk, Orbital and Daft Punk at
Tribal Gathering in the late 1990s
(high , not on speed or ecstasy but
on coff ee and an egg bap), breaking
up with a boyfriend at Digbeth
coach station to the soundtrack
of David Essex’s A Winter’s Tale.
At the heart of The Sound of Being
Human is Rogers’s hunger to fi nd out
why and how music has the power it
does. Her chapters take the form of
“tracks ” – among them A bba’s Super
Trouper , Shirley Collins’s Gilderoy
and Talk Talk’s April 5th – that serve
as cues for learning about music’s
ability to detonate memories, feed
self-expression, help with parenting.
She also racks up hours at the British
Library and speaks to sociologists,
psychologists, neuroscientists and
anthropologists. They, in turn, talk
to her about the brain’s subcortical
structures, dopamine pathways,
synaptic connections, the anterior
cingulate cortex. Few of them speak
with the punchy eloquence of
musician Richard Norris , who says
he loves a meditative drone because
“ when your brain’s concentrating on
one thing, it’s probably cutting off
something, isn’t it?”.
Rogers is alive to pop’s giddy
powers, its ability to intoxicate
and unreel. She even mentions a
neuroscientist who used an MRI
scanner to show that the same parts
of the brain are aroused by music a s by
orgasms. At the same time, she values
music for the ballast and security
it can provide, form in a world that
seems formless, hope in a darkened
heart. Her favourite song, she says,
may well be Martha and the Vandellas’
Heat Wave : “The joy I fi nd in Heat
Wave is its cycle of doubt and delight,
worry and wonder. In the chorus,
Martha sings about not being able
to stop crying, but sounds like she’s
almost relishing that release.”
It has been a long time since I read
a book less jaded about music than
The Sound of Being Human. There are
no scandals here. Scant mention of
streaming or business. Instead, music
is treated as a balm, a torch of memory,
an Esperanto of the human heart. Music
education in the UK, long underfunded
and more buff eted still during Covid,
needs an ambassador; Rogers, so
contagiously ardent, would be perfect.
To buy a copy for £14.78
GETTY; REDFERNS g o t o g u a r d i a n b o o k s h o p. c o m
People have been
posing in front
of their libraries
since Gutenberg
cranked up the
printing press
Soundtrack to a life
A warm memoir delights
in the power of pop
Sukhdev Sandhu
MUSIC
The Sound of
Being Human
How Music
Shapes Our Lives
Jude Rogers
WHITE RABBIT, £16.99Fond memories
of Kraftwerk in
The Sound of
Being Human