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Long Players edited by Tom Gatti review – a richly textured musical survey

<span>Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The public airing of musical tastes doesn’t always bring out the best in human nature. The scope for being snobbish, competitive, judgmental, braggish (humble or otherwise) and a long list of other petty vices is hard to overestimate. Which is partly why politicians, for example, fret so much about calibrating their Desert Island Discs selections. And also why the exercise is often such fun.

The ground rules set by Tom Gatti in this anthology of 50 writers on 49 albums (Ali Smith, slightly thrillingly, declined to stick to the rules), asks the writers not for a best album, but for a “cherished” one that is, or was, important to them. As Ian Rankin, adapting Jean Brodie, explains in relation to his love for John Martyn’s Solid Air: “Give me an album at a certain age and it is mine for life.”

There is a decent enough sample size for the reader to engage in some crude number crunching. The oldest albums are from 1956 – Duke Ellington at the Newport jazz festival, chosen by the late Clive James, and Clara Haskil’s Mozart Piano Concertos, picked by Neel Mukherjee – the most recent is Daisy Johnson’s choice of Lizzo’s 2019 Cuz I Love You. Between them the bulk of the albums come either from the 1970s or the 90s. Depending how you categorise these things there are three jazz albums, two classical and two folk. But most of the choices are in a loosely defined mainstream tradition of modern pop, with Joni Mitchell and David Bowie the only artists to get selected twice.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it turns out that writers tend to value literary effects and skills, and to draw literary comparisons. Deborah Levy, who chose Ziggy Stardust, calls Bowie a “great writer” who has influenced her “more than Tolstoy ever will do”. Sarah Hall compares Radiohead’s OK Computer to “a great short-story collection” and Musa Okwonga loves Outkast’s Aquemini as he loves “the collected short stories of Kurt Vonnegut – every time I return to both works, I find some new way of looking at the human condition”. In less celebratory mode Daljit Nagra links Morrissey – “grudgingly” via the SmithsMeat Is Murder and the 80s yobs who smashed his parents’ shop windows and painted the shutters with racist slurs - to Philip Larkin. “Like Larkin, I’d have Morrissey leave the limelight, so I can love the best work before he smashes the shopfront of his own great tenderness.”

The entries can be just a few hundred words long – some of them began life as a column in the New Statesman where Gatti is deputy editor – but throw up some vividly disparate autobiographical vignettes. In the mid 80s the teenage David Mitchell, who’d “never been in love, much less fallen out of it”, first heard Joni Mitchell’s “raw autobiography” of California heartbreak, Blue, on his Walkman while wandering around his hometown of Malvern. His encounter with the great and dark Christmas breakup song “River” came on a June day “halfway across the golf course”. Around the same time Will Self was in a cavernous flat off the Cromwell Road in west London “with a needle stuck in my arm, the barrel of the syringe full of blood” as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks “strummed his heart strings”. The poet Will Harris recalls how his father once made him “sit through the eight-minute album version of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’” which, very indirectly, led him to Warren G’s Regulate ... G Funk Era.

For all the star-on-star format there are comparatively few encounters between writer and musician. Esi Edugyan, who chose Maxinquaye by Tricky, did have an awkward interview with the artist in Vancouver and Clive James once “swapped smiles” with Ellington after a concert. Most poignant is Rankin’s near miss of “whisky-soaked angel” Martyn. Solid Air had been Rankin’s companion through school and university, marriage and children, even through punk. Years later, now famous himself, he was having lunch before going on Desert Island Discs where he was to declare “the one song I can’t live without is ‘Solid Air’”. And there was Martyn, “with some mates at a nearby bottle-strewn table. And I can’t go and talk to him. My one and only chance and I blow it.”

Some albums are aids to self-actualisation. As a girl in New York, now adopted Brit Erica Wagner just knew the English folk of Steeleye Span’s All Around My Hat “runs through my blood”. And some are resources for self-help, such as with Marlon James, aged 25 and running out “of capital A answers to life’s big questions”. Björk’s Post didn’t straightforwardly reply: “Instead it gave answers to shit I didn’t even ask.” The funniest piece features the 12-year-old Joe Dunthorne discovering Black Sunday by Cypress Hill and its production that allowed “even the straightest listener – the prepubescent boy playing Warhammer – to feel stoned.” The prize for it’s so-uncool-it’s-cool goes to George Saunders for the transcendent sincerity of his response to Fragile by Yes.

Taken as a whole, the collection’s many observations and angles amount to a richly textured snapshot survey of artists on art. And at their best the pieces reveal something useful about the writer, the music, the world at large and the world at that moment. For Linda Grant, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira clearly laid out “the great paradox of 70s feminism”, the desire for independence from men and also for a “love that sticks around”. It also crystallised the strange and powerful relationship between the listener and the artist: “I never saw her perform live. I don’t want to. I’ve no interest in sharing her with total strangers because none of this is about her, it’s about me.”

Long Players by Tom Gatti is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.