To Be Someone

To Be Someone by Ian Stone (2020 Unbound Kindle 303pp)

Ian Stone is a UK stand-up comedian and writer. I have to admit I’d never consciously heard of him until I listened to him interviewed about writing this book on a podcast recently.

In recent years my reading taste seems to have branched out to include many books like this – memoirs cum social histories, usually set in the UK and usually written by men. I think in a way it may be a way of reflecting on my own life by reading the experiences of those of a roughly similar age during the same era I grew up in.

The twist in this book is that the young Stone had a dismal life, growing up largely ignored by his parents and disengaged at school. He instead found solace and mentoring in music, in particular the music of the band “The Jam” fronted by Paul Weller.

We follow him in his early teens as he attends a Jewish school with its own cast of quirky characters and runs the gauntlet of hate and violence around him. His large nose takes a starring role – he’s never more than paragraph away from worrying about how it looks or being insulted about it by some lowlife. His memory of the drab late 1970s is given colour by the people around him and the often-dangerous antics he gets up to. His Mother wouldn’t let him go to a concert for years but thought nothing of him travelling the country alone to attend football games – often complete with riots and thugs.

His parents argue continuously and when his largely useless father loses his job after faking a bomb-threat to get out of work, his mother demands a divorce but ends up having a mental breakdown and attempting suicide.

Meanwhile the young Ian is learning about class, politics and love through the music of “The Jam”. His Mother eventually relents and soon he is off around the country following the band. He and his friends develop a special relationship with the musicians and are given free reign to attend sound-checks and post-show activities.

In-between each chapter there are amusing cartoons by fellow comedian Phil Jupitus and short sections contrasting life in the 1970s/80s with what we have today.

I enjoyed this book and raced through it in a couple of sessions. There’s nothing spectacular about the prose, its all very straight-forward but the author is great at evoking a certain time and place for the reader and if you have any memories of the time period discussed it will certainly resonate more.