LIKE JEANS, reproduction and tennis, music is different for boys than it is for girls. It fits different. It buttons oddly. It’s played over shorter sets. It often hurts more, and is done far less. Chicks are fickle. They don’t decode. They don’t commit. They cavalierly get into bands when they’re recording their best songs, and then look around for something new when the bands falter, bloat or dry up. Women don’t alphabeticise, or obsess, or nit-pick. Girls might scream at McFly, or spend all night clubbing, or call Samaritans – believing that they are dying from sorrow – when Robbie leaves Take That but, really, girls don’t need music. Not needit. Not like how they need vitamins, or whisky, or the right novels, or an outfit in which one can face down a nemesis.

For girls, music is something to be used simply, like air, or food. It’s to be danced to, sung along to, enjoyed, consumed, screamed at, daydreamed about, masturbated over. Music’s just something you get on with. In a nutshell, you’ll be waiting a long time for a theorising, chin-stroking Nick Hornby with tits.

Lavinia Greenlaw is not – at the outset of her rather lovely memoir, anyway – Nick Hornby with tits. Her writing background has the kind of faintly bats, skew-whiff eclecticism that makes one proud to be British: raised in an Essex village by a progressive doctor and scientist couple, Greenlaw began as a poet, and her work has been heavily tilted to an interest in science.

Possibly uniquely among British writers, she was commissioned to write a series of poems about the meaning of numbers for an Equinox documentary. Having, in her poems, covered the ice in Minsk, plundered relics, iron lungs, radium poisoning and the first dog in space, in The Importance of Music To Girls, Greenlaw returns to both the theme of her first novel, the prize-winning Mary George of Allnorthover, and her own childhood: the effect of punk out in the boondocks of 1970s England.

“To be a teenager in the 1970s was to suffer an excess of gravity,” she writes, 30 pages in. “The shape their clothes made was that of something being pulled down to earth: scoop-necked tops, pear-drop collars . . . flared ankle-length skirts and trousers. Their colours were vegetal – umber, ochre, aubergine, mushroom, sage. They looked damp.

“The record sleeves had the same droopy, glutinous lettering as the clothes-shop signs. The music of lost, lumbering creatures. Is that what I had to become?”

The ensuing book, full of poem-sharp paragraphs, chronicles how, in the world before MTV and iTunes, music was a mysterious plain, an uncertain quest. There was no “Like this? Listen to these!” button to click.

No timelines on developments of a musical genre, with stepping stones marked out for the interested, from the Ramones to the Pistols to the Pixies to Nirvana to Queens of the Stone Age. Instead, one wandered out, at the onset of adolescence, and tried to pick up clues, here and there, on the kind of music that might be for you.

“I wanted the music I heard coming from cars,” Greenlaw explains, while detailing how her childhood’s musical landscape consisted of West Side Story, Fats Waller and Chopin. West Side Story has “its own architecture, machinery, circulation, boundaries and weather”. Fats Waller has a “swaggering ugliness” and Chopin, she notes, is ripped off wholesale by Barry Manilow on Could It Be Magic? But, as she turns ten, Greenlaw notices that music is a “social currency”, and that she must “declare allegiance” in order to move forth into adolescence. Almost randomly picking Donny Osmond, she moves onto David Cassidy within a week, before getting her own transistor radio, and carrying round “Radio 1 pressed to my ear, as if listening to Top of The Pops in a seashell”.

As glam and disco wax and wane, Greenlaw uses music like a joyful tool, to lever herself toward adulthood. She and her girlfriends don’t sit around discussing music – instead, they go out together and buy the records, get dressed listening to them, scream along with them, dance in formation to them, put up posters, tear down posters, and call upon music’s power to solve any one of a hundred small, vital daily problems.

To Abba and Bowie and the Sex-O-Lettes and Earth, Wind & Fire, there is bonding and hair-spray and weeping and unsuitable shoes, and discovering what it is to be a girl. It was a simple time.

“We were so colour deprived that we were impressed by a set of six winking red, yellow and green lights lined up in front of the DJ’s desk,” she recounts, as the air fills with the smell of Corona, sweat and Blue Stratos.

But, as is so often the case, when punk comes along, anyone relating its culture-shifting importance can’t help but change their tone – to a slightly preachy and fatally po-faced recitation. Suddenly the joy hisses out of the thing, like a punky stiletto puncturing the droopy lettering on a Rubettes single. Greenlaw starts talking about music like a boy.

“In 1980, irony exploded. Beauty and atrocity were played straight,” she says, to the sound of readers’ hearts failing a little. It’s also around this point that you realise that, while a very beautiful exercise in evocation, The Importance of Music To Girls hasn’t really gone anywhere – or told us what the importance of music to girls is. Not, anyway, as effectively as, say, Caroline Sullivan’s alarmingly involved paean to the Bay City Rollers, Bye Bye Baby, in which Sullivan recounts how she ended up bedding two band members of her girlhood crush. And how awful it was.

Nonetheless, I know at least three people in their late thirties who will be thrilled to read The Importance of Music To Girls. They will love the prose, the clothes, the small towns, the soundtrack. Does it matter if they are all men?

The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw

Faber and Faber, £15.99; 224pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £14.39 (free p&p)

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