THERE are many and varied songs eulogised in 31 Songs (Penguin, £5.99), the latest work from Nick Hornby in which he alights upon his (the clue’s in the title!) 31 favourite pop songs of all time.

But surely the most telling of these is his essay concerning Bruce Springsteen’s ‘70s über-anthem ‘Thunder Road’. Hornby argues in his conclusion: ‘Sometimes it’s hard to remember that a lot of people liking what you do doesn’t necessarily mean that what you do is of no value whatsoever…Springsteen managed to find a way through.’

It’s a description that so easily could have been written about Nick Hornby himself.

As is often the case in the world of pop music, it’s difficult to see beyond the hall-of-mirrors reflection of an artist when they reach a certain commercial nexus.

Apply this to the fusty, conservative world of literature and the point becomes even more amplified. To some (the critics), Hornby is the smug, self-concerned bard of the middle classes, the author-of-choice for people who don’t actually read and the walking definition of why popular fiction gets a bad press.

To others (the people who actually buy books), the 46-year-old old author of High Fidelity, Fever Pitch and About A Boy will forever be the spokesman for modern man, the articulate inner voice behind the tongue-tied ironies of the mid-life English male.

Will the real Nick Hornby please stand up?

He says over the phone from his North London home: “The one thing that I’ve learnt is that labels that you don’t think apply any longer stick to you for long after they’re applicable. I was a ‘New Lad’ for quite a long time, but then that stopped.

For Fever Pitch I was both a yob and a middle-class football fan… and a compassionate male! When you see enough of these labels and you realise that you can’t be any two of them, you understand that they actually don’t mean very much.
I still see myself described as a football novelist in newspapers, and I only wrote one book about football and it wasn’t even a novel! So I’m not gonna pay too much attention to what people write about me.”

31 Songs, which gets a paperback release this month, will give those Hornby dissenters even more ammunition. A creative curveball it certainly ain’t. If anything, it’s a step back towards the popular culture-filtered non-fiction with which Hornby made his name.

Ostensibly, it’s a collection of essays about his favourite 31 songs, covering everything from Teenage Fanclub to Nelly Furtado to (surprise, surprise) Badly Drawn Boy.

Artistic statement

But rather than recalling the trainspottery list-making anti-hero Rob Fleming of High Fidelity, 31 Songs is a much more effusive personal Hornby artistic statement, drawing upon a range of personal experience: how he dealt with overnight fame and success, his son’s battle with autism, and first and foremost, Hornby’s undying love of pop music.

He argues: “You always want to do something people don’t expect, but I just wanted to do it. So I thought ‘**** it’ - I don’t care if I get panned for being predictable. It’s just a labour of love. With 31Songs, first and foremost, I didn’t want to say anything negative about music.

If you’re a music critic you inevitably have to be negative. It seems to me that people are negative most of the time in the music press, which is a very sad thing.”

I suggest Hornby might just be a frustrated music critic masquerading as an author.

“When I was younger I used to think I really wanted to be a music journalist. But it’s a terribly hard thing to do to explain and describe what something sounds like, and you also find yourself using the same vocabulary over and over again. I just don’t think I’m interested in enough kinds of music to want to do it.”

Hornby bets everything on that kind of authenticity, and that’s why 31 Songs is probably the closest and most intimate mental examination of the man yet. Perhaps there was a time when the ‘spokesman for modern man’ tag applied to Hornby, but after countless books and now a sojourn in Hollywood (he’s recently sold a film screenplay he wrote with Emma Thomson to Universal Pictures) even the man himself doesn’t know whom his fanbase consists of. We might be waiting sometime yet before finding out who the real Nick Hornby is.

He concedes: “I think the more you go on, the less aware you become of who your readership is. Because my audiences have not only gotten bigger, they’ve encompassed so many more age ranges and nationalities. In a way, you have to throw audience awareness out of the window, and just hope that people want to read what you’ve written.”

31 Songs (Penguin paperback, £5.99) is out now. Nick Hornby will be reading from the book at Friends Meeting House on Thursday 19 November. Tickets are available from Central Library Theatre (236 7110) priced £5.

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