New tune as Labour’s man of letters recalls musical youth
FROM DELIVERING the mail, in an early working life as a postman, to writing two award-winning volumes of autobiography, Alan Johnson’s credentials as a man of letters were never in doubt.
But in his latest book, the former Home Secretary and Yorkshire MP Alan Johnson is placing on record his matching love of music.
His memoir, In My Life – his second to be named after a Beatles tune – is a journey in song, through his formative years from 1957 to 1982 and covering artists as diverse as Cole Porter, Lonnie Donegan and Billy Joel.
Mr Johnson, who stepped down last year after 20 years in parliament, will discuss the book at a literary lunch next month, organised as part of the Harrogate International Festivals, in partnership with The Yorkshire Post.
The former MP for Hull West and Hessle, has written previously in This Boy about growing up in poverty in the slums of London, and of having been raised by his sister, Linda, after his mother died when he was 13.
In his latest volume, he recalls a lost world of Dansettes and jukeboxes, heartfelt love songs and heartbroken ballads, of smoky coffee shops and dingy dance halls.
“I wanted to be a writer from the age of about 14, or 15,” he said. “I read voraciously from an early age and I wanted to have a go myself. But this went on hold for 50 years.”
Mr Johnson, an outspoken politician who spent 13 years as a Labour Minister, during which time he held five cabinet posts, was a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn, whom he has labelled “useless” and “incapable”, and of David Cameron, whose decision to go to the country on Brexit he called “the biggest folly of any serving Prime Minister”.
But his book strikes a very different tone, with accounts of his family’s deprivation and his mother’s £90 pools win which allowed her to buy furniture on the never-never – most of which was repossessed because she could not keep up the payments.
However, the Dansette record player she bought her son stayed in the family and allowed him to hear for the first time the pile of 78rpm records he had bought for pennies on London’s Portobello Road market years earlier.
She also bought him a guitar, whose smell, he says in the book, “of wood and polish and varnish has stayed with me over the years, reminding me of one of the most joyous days of my life… it looked just like Lonnie’s”.
Tickets for the event, at Harrogate’s Crown Hotel on October 18, are £35 each and bookable at harrogateinternationalfestivals.com.