Last month I paid an eBay seller in the USA a hefty sum to send me a book I once owned and lost: Today’s Sound, a collection of Melody Maker interviews with David Bowie, Miles Davis, Yoko Ono, Slade and many more notables of 1973. Elton John has lush curly hair, Brian Wilson isn’t mad, ‘just shy’, and Bob Marley is ‘potentially a giant figure’.

Other books I count as favourites are Songs They Never Play On The Radio, James Young’s unsparing yet oddly tender memoir about touring with Nico during her heroin-enslaved latter years, and David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse, which delves into the alchemical wonderland of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound.

David Toop’s Ocean Of Sound, for which I was privileged to write a new introduction a few years ago, remains a classic meditation on those beautiful noises that elude conventional structure.

I’ve read dozens of books about The Beatles and regularly revisit tomes like Ian MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head and Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Recording Sessions to check facts. But scholarship is one thing and affection is another. As the decades go by, I grow fonder and fonder of a tattered little hardback called Love Letters To The Beatles, published in 1964 and selected from the sackfuls of missives sent across the sea by hormonal American children. Margaret from Pittsburgh asks John if ‘very plump’ girls with braces and freckles ‘stand a chance’. Karen from Massachusetts itemises the $24.79 she’s spent on Beatles merchandise and concludes ‘I adore you. Take my heart. It is all I have left.’ An only child in Denver muses ‘a lot of lonely kids feel like me’. Sweet, unguarded and occasionally pathetic (one girl begs for a bristle from Ringo’s toothbrush), these letters go to the heart of infatuation. 

Michel Faber, Edinburgh Futures Institute, run ended; picture Kristina Varaksina.