UNCORRECTED BOUND PROOF BOOK PROPOSAL: THE EMOTIONAL REMIX

Marcello Carlin is a lifelong NHS worker who writes about music in his spare time. In fact he has written several million words about music in various blogs, books and publications over the last quarter-century. It is extremely likely that you have not read any of them.

I was briefly famous in the late summer of 1967 for being able to read and write fluently at an exceptionally early age. At the time I was assumed to be a child prodigy. Because my parents could not afford specialist tutors for me, however, I had no alternative but to go to school like any other normal child. That was the second mistake.

The first mistake was that my status as a child prodigy was a misdiagnosis. As soon as I started school, which in retrospect was somewhere I shouldn't have been left anywhere near, I viewed life and especially other people through a peculiar gauze screen. I could see my peers but couldn't understand the unspoken body language and therefore had an extremely difficult time trying to communicate with them.

That tendency has stayed with me throughout college, university, work and semi-attempted social life. I am tolerated rather than liked. The gauze screen in front of me has also acted as a barrier between me and other people. This proved to be entirely down to a mental condition with which I had been born. Knows his Livy's Early History Of Rome aged five but can't tie his shoelaces aged fifteen. The signs were obvious but nobody, least of all myself or my parents, even tried to recognise them.

It wasn't until I was formally diagnosed with that condition - ASD Level One, since you asked - in May 1995 that everything finally became explicable. I ticked box after box, and this ball and chain which I have been compelled to drag around with me my whole life has closed off many avenues down which I could otherwise have ventured. It is why I am not a CEO with a six-figure salary and a nice detached house in Dulwich. It is why you have almost certainly never have heard of me. I lack the essential characteristic to make such things happen. Occasionally I miss not having it but most of the time I don't.

I did not start writing about music in public until after my first partner died of cancer in August 2001. I took it up on the advice of a professional psychotherapist, as a tool to cope with my grief. When I set up my first blog, The Church Of Me, at the end of 2001 my long-term task with the writing in it was to dig myself a tunnel out of bereaved hell, and in that I eventually succeeded.

The Church Of Me received huge approval and a remarkably high number of readers at its peak, and got me (via my own prodding) some published work, but that was at a time when music blogs of note could be counted on the fingers of two hands with plenty to spare, before the professionals moved in and turned the term "blog" into a brand. Nevertheless I continued with my writing, sometimes sporadically and at other times with intense frequency.

My other major blog is Then Play Long, which I co-author with my second wife, Lena Friesen - we encountered each other as a direct consequence of what I was doing on CoM - and which takes long and patient looks at all British number one albums from mid-1956 to the present (currently the autumn of 1996). The blog has taken a few extended breaks but at the time of writing is indubitably active).

My third mistake was to start writing about music in public when I was thirty-seven years old, thus instantaneously freezing me out of the closed shop of British music criticism. If I was going to be of any consequence, I should have started a lot sooner. I haven't paid my dues, photocopied the fanzines, written 150 words about the Edgar Broughton Band in a pub just outside Aylesbury on a wet Thursday autumn evening into an even wetter notebook. Hence I am generally viewed as a rather sad dilettante, a groaning ambulance chaser, a never-was (the chant of terminal damnation: "He's just a blogger!").

As a consequence of the above, I have been left out, excluded, seemingly deliberately, from the ocean of critical discourse, even though I feel I have plenty to say and some spectacularly good ways of saying it. And since my ASD Level One - not to mention a fairly brutal childhood upbringing, where any residual confidence and self-belief were literally knocked out of me - has rendered me incapable of selling myself (in terms of music writing, anyway - I've always been quite good at selling myself to the NHS, though, which is good because it's kept me alive these past thirty-nine years), you very likely don't know about my writing.

WHEN ARE YOU GETTING TO THE BLOODY BOOK?

I wrote this 120,000-or-so word book, Uncorrected Bound Proof, between New Year's Day and early August, 2023. The book contains 100 chapters, each inspired by a piece of music, and not just any pieces of music. It is based upon my Your Top Songs 2022 Spotify playlist, and I write about each song, in reverse order, from numbers 100 to 1.

While looking through that 2022 playlist it did occur to me that the sequencing of music would act as a good tool to guide me through the story of my life and all the joys and horrors which I have experienced in life's course. I wrote the chapters in strict ascending numerical order so my story is guided in part by those semi-random factors and is not told chronologically. Which is a major relief, since nothing bores me more about biography than the weary standard processional of "THIS happened, then THAT happened." Nothing important has been omitted but I wouldn't be inclined to reorder the chapters chronologically. The idea is to express life's ups and downs as though on an actual helter-skelter ride.

"Spotify, though..."

Yes, I know. It was supposed to be this great algorithmic liberator - everything instantly available to the listener! Well, everything that the algorithm judges that I ought to be listening to and appreciating. As the book progresses you may note an incrementally-increasing impatience mounting up, as the listener realises that this is not so much liberation, more of a comfier prison cell.

The one hundred songs on that Spotify list do not really reflect my overall listening habits or even my musical tastes. I do not feel the need to listen to my favourite music several times per week. Not that there's anything on that list that I do not like; why would I waste my time listening to music I loathed? But perhaps one of Spotify's subtexts is to make the listener exhausted by music and finally loathing all of it. "Where can I hide from Your love?" as expressed in both Psalm 139 and Frank O'Hagan's song "Another Day."

So there ensue repeated attempts to breach the algorithmic wall. Some of the songs offered me an excuse to revisit some of my previous writing and speak about much, much more than the songs themselves. One song acts as a pretext to describe in gruesome detail the 137 days I spent as an inpatient at St George's Hospital in April-August 2018 following near-fatal surgery. Finally, the wall is broken and the book concludes or climaxes with an exhilarating rush of prose about songs which do not appear in the list at all, as though throwing the algorithm out with the bathwater.

The book finishes on the side of life.

MUSIC, AND WRITING ABOUT IT

In the early stages of attempting to get people interested in Uncorrected Bound Proof, I played up the notion that it was NOT "a music book." This was disingenuous - of course it's a bloody music book! - but I was rather reluctant to submerge the book beneath the waves of what is accepted as music criticism today.

I was worried that the book was going to be read wrongly, or assessed or damned for the wrong reasons. Since in a perfect world there is no such entity as wrongness, that worry was a bit unfounded.

But I am obliged to point out a few factors (I'm not going to call them "caveats"). This is not a gigantic encylopaedia of music history. You are unlikely to learn much about the "big" stories or the logistics and mechanics which made them occur. When I watched Bowie performing "Starman" on Top Of The Pops in the summer of 1972 I did so on a wonky black-and-white portable television in a boarding house in a rainy Blackpool. In addition I was eight years old in 1972, so it didn't change my life one atom. Yet Bowie makes an extended posthumous cameo appearance in UBP, in the course of my discussion of Daphne Guinness' "Revelations," which I have constructed as a word-for-word rewrite of the Book of Revelations but with Bowie as the instrument of the Second Coming (remember how the world seemed to start going to pot directly after he died?).

This list of a hundred songs does not include many of the standard items you would expect to see in any of those all-time best songs charts. No law is being laid down. But its cast list includes Mark Ronson, the Weeknd, Giorgio Moroder, Charles Mingus, Mickey Newbury, Riverdance, Curve, "Taste The Biscuit," Al Martino, Public Enemy, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Anne-Marie David, Underworld, Stereolab, Hot Chip, Nirvana, the Boo Radleys, Adriano Celentano, Aphex Twin, the orchestras of Tony Hatch and Johnny Pearson, Mike Oldfield (the entire first side of Ommadawn, no less), Samantha Mumba, World Of Twist, Conchita Wurst, Future Islands, "Gangnam Style" and of COURSE the Associates and Radiohead.

OXFORD

The two Radiohead chapters were the hardest to write, not simply because I lived in Oxford for many years and was, ahem, there when certain things happened, but also because they amplified the doubts which had steadily been accumulating in my mind following the death of my first partner. Doubts as in, looking back, and with plenty of time in which to look back, there was something very, very wrong about the way we lived in the nineties. So these chapters, particularly the one on "Pyramid Song," constitute my closest and rawest attempts to seize my past and come to terms with it. Some readers may find this content upsetting. But if I don't say it while I'm still alive, who will ever be said to have said it?

"Don't feel sorry for Punctum Boy; you know he wants the world to love him, and then goes and spoils it all..."

There are many, many stories to be told in parallel to or in supersession of mine. So why would you want to read this particular story, told by somebody whom in all likeliness you have never heard of?

I think it's because the story is being told by a person to whom music has had an especially umbilical connection. This is the tale of a grown man who as a boy was routinely beaten up by his father for buying records and ended up having to hide them in the attic, and thereafter vowed that NOBODY was ever going to tell him again not to buy records or care for music. It is the story of a person who has thought more deeply and thoroughly about music than most people but has no real means of advertising that thought.

Perhaps above all else the book represents a cry, a calling to attention, to demonstrate exactly what music writing can do and where it can take listener, reader or writer alike. Uncorrected Bound Proof is not an anthology of matey anecdotes with an ending so pat that music lover Pat Nevin would be offended. Nor does it retell the same old stories which mainly didn't happen in the first place, or not in the way you've been economically persuaded to believe they happened. To criticise the book for missing out artist XYZ really is missing the point. Indeed it "misses out" nearly all artists. In conclusion, the book states that I want music writing to live, breathe and matter again, just as I have done with my life, which I have nearly lost perhaps five or six times in the last quarter-century, but instead decided to let music help save it. The book could save your life too.