The Train in the Night : A Story of Music and Loss

How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss. The "Train in the Night" is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life - and to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music. Of all our relationships with art, the one we enjoy with music is the most complex, the most mysterious and, for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone, the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. And yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are, at our most naked, unsophisticated, honest, and simplified. Through psalms, symphonies, love songs, ballads, boogie...Where to start, though, for the newly deaf? Well, you can start, suggested a famous neurologist, by trying to remember every beautiful piece of music you've ever heard and then by thinking about that music over and over again until it begins to assume a new kind of form in your brain. You never know what might happen after that. And so that's what the author did. He went back to the origins of his passion - the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe - and then worked his way forwards through the back catalogue. The "Train in the Night" is a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, obviously. But it is also about becoming young again and trying to see the world for what it is, whether through the eyes of a teenage punk or those of a middle-aged music critic and father of two. It is about taste and love and suffering and delusion. It is about longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true. It is a hymn to music.

Nick Coleman was born in Buckinghamshire in 1960 but grew up in the Fens. Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, he was Music Editor of Time Out magazine for seven years. This was followed by a dozen years as Arts and Features Editors at the Independent and Independent on Sunday. He has also written for The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, US Vogue, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire - mostly about music but also books, sport and travel. He lives in Hackney with his wife and two children.