Looking To Get Lost: Adventures In Music & Writing

★★★★ Peter Guralnick LITTLE BROWN. £20

First book in five years from biographer of Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips and Sam Cooke.

Searching Google Books for Peter Guralnick’s latest tome, it was bemusing to find it filed under “Self-help”. But if anything holds together this substantial collection of essays, commentary and memoir, it’s the ongoing story of how blues changed Guralnick’s life. He had planned to be a novelist. After discovering the blues at around age 15-16, he started writing about it “with one idea only: to tell people about this music that I thought was so great.” He talks about it in terms of a calling, part scholar, part innocent. One engaging moment is his Q&A with Eric Clapton, who also fell into the blues at 15-16. Their “conversation about a shared obsession” is up there with anything found in a Nick Hornby novel. There is a piece on Tammy Wynette, but Looking To Get Lost is mostly a boys’ adventures-inmusic book. Not as cohesive as his epic biographies, nevertheless there is plenty worth reading here.