If your first reaction to the subject matter of Nick Hornby’s new book is a perplexed “Huh?”, you might take comfort in knowing its author had similar feelings. In superficial terms, his yoking together of two cultural giants – the novelist Charles Dickens and musician Prince Rogers Nelson – seems unusual given they operated not just in different media but different centuries. While both found fame early and died in their 50s, the bare bones of their biographies are otherwise wildly different. Before beginning his research, it seemed to Hornby that the biggest thing they had in common was him. “They are,” he writes, “two of what I shall have to describe … as My People – the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my work.”
It was a commemorative box set of Prince’s 1987 album Sign o’ the Times that gave him the idea for this book, which, at 90-odd pages, is really more of an essay. Record labels have long extended the shelf lives of dead artists by appending lost tracks, whether old demos or live recordings, on to classic albums. But the newly released Sign o’ the Times package took this to extremes, featuring an astonishing 63 unreleased songs – that’s four times as many as appeared on the original LP. This led Hornby to wonder what other artists have been as prolific as Prince, and so he alighted on Dickens.
