Bringing it All Back Home by Ian Clayton

Frank Zappa once sneered that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture". It was the most memorable of the American composer's many creative achievements, if not the most extensive or complicated. It was also the most personally revealing. In its dismissive, clever way, the phrase betrayed the anxiety that many of the great men of music have often felt about those who attempt to hijack their art by - shudder - writing about it. It's a fear of music getting into the wrong hands. Zappa's real disdain, you feel, was not reserved for those who intellectualise music, but for those who use writing to take music into their possession. It's certainly hard to imagine him smiling warmly as he turns the pages of this book.

This is not because Clayton is wrong about anything, or even because he intellectualises music - he isn't and he doesn't. But because Clayton's writing makes music his. His book is chiefly concerned with what music does to you (well, to Ian Clayton), not how music is made or what it says about its creators or what it stands for - an approach that often drives the loftier kind of musician into paroxysms of contempt. Well, stuff 'em. It's a good book, if not a flawless one; a book about the difference between sentiment and deep feeling; about escape and facing up; about how the function of music to a certain kind of listener (and yes, they're often boys) is to map his world, both inside and out. Bringing It All Back Home is an account, as they say on television, of a personal journey.

And while you recover from that bombshell, let me assert here that Clayton does not lack respect for musicians. On the contrary, his reverence for the ones he likes is terribly uninhibited. They rock his world. Here is a list of some of his favourites. Jimi Hendrix, Ben Webster, Hank Williams, T-Bone Walker, Richard Hawley, Elmore James, John Martyn, Kate Rusby, Robert Wyatt, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, Sainkho Namtchylak, the Sex Pistols, Johnny Cash, the Rolling Stones, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Roy Herrington (King of Yorkshire blues guitar), BB Singh (King of Indian blues guitar) and, above all of them, Billie Holiday, she of the "scorched newspaper" voice. Get the picture? Clayton is of a certain age and he has "good taste", the sort you get from listening to the blues and its derivatives at the right time and in a suitable place. We should all be so lucky.

Clayton grew up in and around the Yorkshire mining town of Featherstone at the time of popular music's great technical and social out-reach. He was born in 1959, came to adolescent fullness with punk and, quite clearly, got round the cultural disappointments of his twenties in the 1980s by embracing The Other with a bear-like grip - jazz, world music, yet more blues and so on. He has always been, he says, interested in "the voice of the common people". He collects records, he writes, he broadcasts, he tells stories, he travels up and down the highways of his taste. It's been a raconteur's life.

This somewhat spotty wanderlust has taken him, inter alia, to India, Hungary, Germany, Memphis and Ilkley, the latter in search of people who remember Hendrix's apparition in the town in the late 1960s. He also goes to Batley in pursuit of Louis Armstrong and Doncaster to find Johnny Cash. In both places he finds quite a lot of himself. Music is an internal map, you see.

"When my grandad told me that I should never work down the pit, he never really told me what else I might do. Well, what he actually said was, 'If I ever see thee near that pit I'll give thee a bloody good hiding!'" Clayton's grandad thought Ian should "Read books, lad!"

I quote this passage for two reasons. Firstly, because you ought to know the kind of voice you're getting into bed with. Secondarily, so that you can begin to grasp the basics of the back story that voice is trying to tell. If you have a pathological aversion to big-hearted northern grit, this isn't the book for you. But you'll be missing out. Because it's in the economic, social and cultural shift that took place during the course of Clayton's post-post-war lifetime - from the life of the mines to Jimi Hendrix in a giant step - that you get to see the real value and, ultimately, the point of popular music as it was constituted during that period.

Clayton doesn't explicate this point; it's implicit in his yarns. And even if, frustratingly, he never goes very far into the subject of "taste" as an idea, you do begin to get a sense from his story of how "taste" during that period was more than a fetish of bourgeois individualism; that it was an important tool in the remaking of English society for the better. And no, I'm not joking.

Bringing It All Back Home also contains a dreadful shock, right at the end. I won't tell you what it is but it is dreadful and it brings out the best in Clayton's voice. It's also the point at which you understand in your stomach that there is a massive difference between sentiment and deep feeling, and yet that they are intimately connected. Billie Holiday knew this and so, possibly, does BB Singh.