I was in town last week on the lookout for some vinyl – for once, not for myself but as a wedding present for a dear friend from university days. Normally it’s Sister Ray or Rough Trade for me but in quest of some classics at a relatively wince-free price I ended up in Fopp on Earlham Street, right in the middle of touristy central London.
This branch of Fopp is one that always reminds me of my first days in the capital city; an early noughties spring in my step, the bounce of anticipation that a gem would present itself forth in the CD racks or in the stacks of cool-looking books by the door. I knew then that Fopp wasn’t the crate-digging connoisseur’s first choice but the shop seemed to embody freedom from judgement, the chance of leaving with one of those clear bags (with the cheerfully cartoonish black-and-red logo) dangling from eager fingers, brimming with discoveries old and new. There was always one more thing (at least) inside than I had intended to buy. As a shopping experience it represented guilt-free fun and optimism.
Sadly the days of sashaying away with three albums and an interesting book for under 20 quid are gone. The rebirth of vinyl as luxury object – and the cost of pressing it – means it is now pretty normal to spend £35 on the new Stereolab LP, for example.
I was looking for a “new” and a “blue” to complement the “borrowed” and “old” assembled already for a nerdish gift to the happy couple. As I pondered my choices I found my gaze landing on the bookshelves tucked away on the second floor.
First up I scanned from the bottom and saw Bob Stanley’s Let’s Do It about the birth of pop music going for a fiver. Higher up, I spied Tracey Thorn’s excellent Bedsit Disco Queen and biographies of Elvis and The Who. And then, in a strange kind of slo-mo my eyes fell upon my own book, Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s. For six quid! Um, that’s a quarter of the cover price. Is this victory or defeat?
I feel that I brought my story (of growing up in 1990s northern England, set to a soundtrack of Pulp, the Manics, Spice Girls and the KLF) to the world in the dying days of a bygone pre-AI age…
Quite a lot of books end up in Fopp because the publisher has printed more than they can sell through the main avenues, such as Waterstones or Amazon. These excess copies are sold cheaply to remainder distributors, who pass them on to shops like Fopp who deal in bargains. That’s why my hardback is going for £6 instead of £22. To be a pessimist, then, its presence here meant that the hardback didn’t sell enough and now it’s been booted onto the discount shelves to spend its retirement, albeit a cool one with Bob and Tracey as pals.
So why did I feel nothing but a feeling of pride and delight? This is why: my book had returned to the place it began, a book about music fandom in amongst the music that sparked my own years as a fan. It is now living side-by-side with the CDs and LPs that inspired its very existence (and a few shelves above Bob from Saint Etienne, how could I not be thrilled with the company?). Connection is a Song (yes, named after the Elastica track) will now be seen by music fans who might not have known it existed until now. It will become someone else’s “I bought one more thing than I came in for”.
There’s another thing too. I could not have possibly known my timing was on a technological and cultural knife-edge. The hardback of Connection is a Song first entered the world in the pre-AI universe of May 2024. Very few of us were outsourcing our lives to Chat GPT, Grok or Co-Pilot then. That was still the domain of early adopters. Pompous as it might sound, I feel that I brought my story (of growing up in 1990s northern England, set to a soundtrack of Pulp, the Manics, Spice Girls and the KLF) to the world in the dying days of a bygone age.
Read more: Connection is a Song – A book about you
Every bit of research was done the “old way” – through books, magazines and photos that had to be retrieved from the loft, and conversations and text messages with teen-era friends who appear in the book. It was mostly written via requests to my own memory (spurred on, always, by the music). There was plenty of Googling, yes, but it was me combing through videos and old blogs when it was necessary to establish what Candy Flip wore in their video for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Neither did I rephrase one single sentence using artificial intelligence. I sat for hours with the Official Chart book of the 1990s, scouring the pages for confirmation that my teen memories were backed up by facts. I checked repeatedly to ensure I wasn’t wrong when I wrote that Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ – which “casts a sorrow beam across the doorstep of the decade” – really was the first UK single of the ’90s released in the ’90s to get to number one. I’m extremely grateful I was never tempted to “ask anything” when I was feeling tired or lazy.
Scarily, Chat GPT is getting adept at “being me” – asking it to pen this sentence, it does a pretty good job of aping my style of writing*. It struck me that, in this new age of AI, authors only really get one stab at establishing their voice. Once a book is out there to be crawled and imitated, you’ve kind of “given yourself” to AI. There’s no second chance, really. Am I being Luddite? Is this a new creative frontier to be embraced? I don’t know but at least my book – written entirely in human – is six quid in Fopp.
By the way, the paperback – now with its fresh pink ’90s magazine look – is only three months old and costs a tenner when you find it on the music shelves of stores like Waterstones and Foyles. It has also been spied by friends in indie bookshops around the country. If you’re in the Midlands try The Heath Bookshop – Indie Bookshop of the Year! There have also been sightings in Peckham and Camberwell, in south London, Crouch End in north London, in the wilds of North Yorkshire from where it hails, and – a nice surprise – in Whitstable in Kent.
Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s
*Creepy twist: I asked ChatGPT to write as me. It nailed the tone. Too well. Might need to watch my back. (Written by Chat GPT)
Anna Doble, August 2025
For your savage amusement 