Maybe I’m Amazed
John Harris
★★★★
(JOHN MURRAY)
When James, their 3-year-old son, is diagnosed with autism in 2009, MOJO writer John Harris and his partner Ginny Luckhurst find themselves taking the first steps on a long and daunting path. Locating specialist support and educational establishments sufficiently equipped or prepared to help their son cope or even flourish proves hard enough, but more dismaying still is the fear, stoked by some experts on the condition, that they will never truly ‘connect’ with their son on an emotional level that both parties would understand in the same way.
But as James starts to experience music – as an obsessive listener, and later, a creator and even performer – his equally music-mad parents are obliged to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations. Capabilities including James’s ability to instantly identify chords and key centres reveal themselves. It seems he possesses that most mysterious and prized muso asset: perfect pitch. A lapsed guitarist, Harris returns to the instrument to help turn James’s personal exploration of music – as a player of keyboards, then bass – into a means of social engagement. While those efforts bring disappointments as well as breakthroughs it’s clear that while James’s appreciation of music might be different, it’s nonetheless profound.
Harris’s book weaves in ardent appreciations of the artists James immerses in: Mott The Hoople, whose singer Ian Hunter offers James a ringside seat at soundcheck before a gig in Frome, The Clash – a lodestar from Harris’s youth – The Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk. But most of all, The Beatles, whose breadth, depth, colour and sophistication appear anew to Harris though the eyes of his son. Along the way, the question recurs: how differently are father and son interacting with the music they love? Hardcore music fans will be familiar with insinuations that we are ‘on the spectrum’. Harris wonders if this could be actually true of himself and traces a strand of obsessive behaviour back through his DNA.
Caring for their son takes all the tenacity, positivity and good humour that Harris’s colleagues at MOJO, the Guardian and beyond will recognise. And it’s a testament to his outlook and a measure of his book that his contribution to this most self-indulgent of literary genres is not self-indulgent at all. While its musical insights – especially its Fabs-centric ones – are typically piercing, Maybe I’m Amazed is perhaps more reminiscent of his hard-hitting 2005 volume of political commentary, So Now Who Do We Vote For?, than his music books – which include the definitive dissection of Britpop, The Last Party. It’s essentially a polemic. How is it that we know so little about autism in 2025, and are so bad at supporting the autistic and their carers? In the UK’s current climate, with the focus turning once again to benefit cuts, it’s hard to map a progressive path.
And yet, as a tribute to the power of music to forge lines of communication between people separated by divergent ways of thinking (by extension, cultural and geographical boundaries as much as neurological ones), Maybe I’m Amazed is as uplifting as it is in other respects troubling. The obstacles facing the autistic and their carers are considerable enough without knee-jerk “othering”. If we can all get down to Funkadelic’s Fish, Chips And Sweat, maybe our brains don’t work so differently after all.
Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris is published by John Murray on March 27.
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