Songs they never play on the radio

Moving house means moving books. I started the process of clearing the shelves and deciding which ones to keep as soon as I thought about putting the house on the market. I knew I couldn't keep them all. I bought boxes and boxes of them to the local specialist charity book shop round the corner from where I am now living. It wasn't difficult to pass them on, mainly because I have kept so many. I asked myself if I would read it again, and if the answer was yes, I kept it. I had a fantasy that I would tidy and categorise my personal library - after all I have worked in libraries and archives. The reality was that books got packed in boxes room by room, but were unpacked randomly when all sense of order was thrown to the winds as I raced against the clock to unpack boxes and get my new home habitable. So the books on the shelves are even more random than they were at the old house. I have multiple copies of some - I Capture the Castle, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Children of Green Knowe and oddly Mick Middles book on Joy Division and New Order to name a few. I'm still discovering others. Books jump out at me from unfamiliar arrangements in familiar places. Most weeks I have a day of train travel and waiting. I find it hard to concentrate, so I choose a book that I think I can read in a day, an old friend off the shelf, self contained and comforting in its familiarity. A couple of weeks ago someone mentioned James Young's book about Nico, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, saying it should be reissued with a new foreword . I bought my copy at a friend's bookshop in Bakewell many years ago, when it had been remaindered by the publisher. You can see by the price label. I came very close to giving it away to Antony Hegarty some years later, knowing he was a huge Nico fan, as a thank you for putting me on his guest list. I was torn, because I wanted to keep the book, but I knew how much he would appreciate it. Fate intervened literally the day before I saw him, when a single copy turned up on an otherwise empty outdoor display shelf at a cut price bookshop in rural Derbyshire. Spooky. So I kept my copy. I must have read it back in the mid nineties. I may even have read it more than once. It was only when I read it again last week that I realised it was more fact than fiction, and that I was being introduced to a darker side of people known to me. Some were people I'd see out and about at gigs, others I'd worked with, even had my hair cut by. I felt more sensitive and vulnerable to this darker version of Mancunian history and Nico's part in it.I felt shocked and I felt guilty for passing it on to Antony, possibly shattering his illusions about Nico. I realised that while I had admired her over the years, I had never mythologised her, because I'd seen some of the reality of her time in Manchester. Reading a book in a day is an intense experience and this is a great read.