God Is In The Radio: Unbridled Enthusiasms 1980-2020

★★★★ Barney Hoskyns

OMNIBUS. £18.99

Veteran music writer’s 50 greatest hits. Most genres covered.

It’s a simple, albeit peculiarly subtitled, notion. Twenty-five previously published short reviews, followed by 25 longer features, from a 1984 NME piece on a weary Bobby Womack to an elegiac 2018 Amy Winehouse tribute for Charles Moriarty’s Back To Amy compendium. Hoskyns isn’t a writer for the shorter haul and so daft claims that Ian Curtis’s voice was “Mark E Smith meets Stan Ridgway” or that Rufus Wainwright has “10 times” the talent of Elton John pass by unjustified. The longer essays, though, are an unadulterated joy, whether he’s re-telling the dark Judee Sill and Sly Stone sagas, re-evaluating Luther Vandross (who confesses “sometimes I get so, so, so, so fuckin’ depressed”) or Up Up & Away writer Jimmy Webb reminiscing about walking into a Joni Mitchell session and folk singer Eric Andersen hollering “it’s Mr Balloons”. For all his enthusiasm, Hoskyns’ knowledge is deep and his curiosity insatiable. He asks the tougher questions too, whether it’s Polly Harvey’s relationship to drugs (“she politely slams the door in my face”) or if Randy Newman might stop the “fabulously paid hackwork” of film soundtracks and “make another poor-selling Randy Newman album”. To precis a lengthy, but fascinating answer: no.