Book 17 - Paul Morley "A Sound Mind"

Paul Morley "A Sound Mind" (Bloomsbury Publishing)




I was flirting with tackling this brick for a while and almost tossed it aside again when I realized who the author was. This is because I have distant memories of Morley acting out when he was a leading gadfly in the British music press, before attaching himself to the entourage that was ZTT Music; after which I lost track of him.

Flash forward a generation or so, and Morley is well past his mid-life crisis and has reinvented himself as a commentator on classical music for the ageing hipsters of the world. In as much as I resemble that remark, I got a good bit out of this book. Morley's adventures in trying to get a clue, his overview of a lot of music he might not otherwise have heard of, and some astute comments on the rise and fall of a certain type of music environment and economy, were all well appreciated. However, there is no denying that this work probably could have been about 150 pages shorter, and is more of a memoir of Morley's career, than a left-field history of classical music.

Perhaps, it is one to dip into next time, rather than reading it contiguously.