“Fizzy and impatient” is how Lavinia Greenlaw describes her childhood self.
Through music she maps her teenage search for belonging – taking in the playground politics of circle dances (“you might hover on the edge and hope for someone to stumble and create an opening”); being a “desirable and bad” disco girl; a fling with heavy metal (“engine noise – it was trucks on the cricket pitch, bulldozers tearing up the green”); and the “collisions and detonations” of punk and the Gothic poetry of Joy Division.
This memoir is a meditation on 1970s Englishness, “half feudal, half looking to the future”. The local punks are beaten by grown men, “as if ridding the town of demons”.
Her father sings in a barber shop quartet, her mother in a madrigal choir. Greenlaw herself plays blues, but it’s “English, sturdy and contained”. She finds escape in Radio Caroline, broadcasting from a boat off Essex, “coming from a distance, out of the dark”.
Recalling everything from Wagon Wheels and Angel Delight to the futuristic graphics of Factory Records, her voice is charming, witty and tenderly poetic.
