There’s a moment in Mario Vargas Llosa’s excellent Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter where your whole notion of the boundaries between the world, the book and its various fictional realities starts to go to pieces. Where the Scriptwriter’s various soap operas, which interspersed the main story of the novel, start to intertwine and characters start appearing, albeit peripherally, in the wrong stories. It’s as if the cement certainties you had when you started reading have been dissolved and are rotting away, leaving bits and pieces of the various spaces the characters (and you) occupy to bleed into one another.

Terrifyingly, these are the people who you want to run the government rather than the people who do

I mention this only because I’ve been getting into The West Wing – all seven series of it – and it’s been an interesting ride. It seems to start off almost as if the original pitch meeting was “it’s like Friends, but in the White House and with fewer laughs” only for it to develop into a Runyonesque political commentary. So there’s the spunky, irritating John Hughes chick who’s a little bit kooky, but somehow endearing and lovable (not lovable or interesting enough to make it to Season 2 though); the President who initially comes off like a cartoon Dubya Bush, but ends up redefining American politics, getting things done and achieving stellar approval points; the various policy makers who amazingly also manage to get things done and who seem to shed their initial personality quirks (like inadvertently sleeping with hookers for instance) as the seasons progress and somehow manage to make the country better; the ‘comedy couple’ who initially start as a parody of husband and wife and end up representing the humanity of the series; and the Press Secretary, who starts off all spin and flippancy, but ends up Chief of Staff, thereby defining the show’s move from spin parody to political seriousness.  By the end of Series 7 you’re left with a profound sense of the importance and gravitas of American politics. So much so that the entire final season, way the best of the bunch, is devoted to the campaign to replace the President. And it’s so enthralling, that you’re happy that one entire episode is a televised debate between the two candidates and that two are devoted to the election day itself.

But the moment that cracked it for me, the moment I saw through the glass and into the disturbing, reality blurring space beyond, was when characters from The Wire began to bleed through into individual or multiple episodes. Cedric Daniels, in a moment of pre-Wire policing, is a detective who is supervising a death scene. His wife (or possibly ex-wife by then) Marla is apparently moonlighting as the principal of an elementary school (could this explain her frigid relationship with Cedric during the early series of The Wire?). Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman obviously cut her teeth working for the Republicans up on the Hill, doing deals to secure appropriate legislation and judicial appointments prior to banging McNulty and then Cedric Daniels. Maurice Levy puts in a pre-corrupt lawyer appearance as a harassed White House adviser (obviously showing that eventually the profits of crime do entice individuals away from the honest legal system). Not even the Barksdales are immune from a little moonlighting from the running of their drugs empire. In case anyone was concerned about Brianna’s exact role in the Barksdale’s ever-expanding criminal empire and what she spent her time doing, it’s clear that she spends most of her non-crime minutes organising secret polling for political parties – the political equivalent of  highly deniable black ops missions.  I was relieved that the likes of McNulty, Bunk, Snoop and Omar didn’t make appearances otherwise I really would have been confused (or the plot of The West Wing would have taken a seriously violent turn).

It’s not that the appearance of characters from one series in another is that disturbing, after all Marcie from Alias and Commander Adama from Battlestar Galactica also make appearances (and we don’t really think it is Commander Adama), it’s just that you could believe that the rarefied world of Washingtonian politics and the crack-fuelled underbelly of Balitmorian law enforcement could collide in just such a surreal way. After all, if Major ‘Bunny’ Colvin can almost get a job running the security at Johns Hopkins (before incinerating his career prospects by attempting to legalise drugs) and President Bartlett’s daughter Ellie can study there, it’s not a great leap of faith to imagine that the two narratives could somehow link and intertwine.

I’ve been frantically reviewing and relistening to loads of old albums since Christmas. Seeking out tracks like Mongoloid by Devo (the first song my first band ever attempted to learn – with catastrophic effects), the first Dexy’s Midnight Runners album, classic Kraftwerk and a pile of others. Why? You ask. Because of this outstanding doorstop of a book.

When I originally saw it I just thought it was a useful sort of anthology present thing that at £4 was an easy win, but on reading it I just got sucked in. Not just because Mulholland’s initial choices for albums pretty much matched my musical indoctrination, but because the writing was just so damn good. It not only gives you a sense of what each album’s like, but the conditions under which it was made and puts it into some sort of historical and musical context. That way I’m genuinely intrigued about albums I really haven’t been bothered with, like the Dexy’s Midnight Runners one or Kate Bush’s The Dreaming.

It’s not simply this, but it’s the appearance of some pretty obscure records that I can remember listening to a lot while I was growing up, like the first Roxy Music Greatest Hits album or Christina’s version of ‘Is That All That There Is’, which in the aftermath of punk were something of a revelation for me. It’s a selection that gives you that strange internal wink that says, ‘Yes I was there and even though only 3 people liked this record, it was one of my favourites’, the shared secrecy of musical obsession. And it’s Mulholland’s understanding of the year zero effect of punk on people’s musical tastes that is so impressive. His thesis that punk was about the elevation of the guitar and the intoxication of the live experience and that the mid 80′s saw a corresponding elevation of bass and rhythm hadn’t occurred to me, but seems patently obvious once you consider it.

The great thing about books like this is that you can see trends slowly appearing through time as punk collapses, pop emerges and rap and dance music evolve. It reminds us in retrospect what a divergent time the mid 80′s was, with UK indie music going all jangly and arpeggio, rap just beginning to find its feet and American guitar music preparing the way for the grunge revolution of Nirvana.

As with all these books, your own journey and the author’s start to diverge as Mulholland gets engrossed by rap. As a result he misses out of a pile of my personal favourites, The Young Gods album, Underworld’s ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’, Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, The Stone Roses’ debut and others, classics all and certainly head and shoulders above some of the later inclusions.

Even so, as a whole Fear of Music does the most incredible thing, it makes you genuinely excited by music and, at a time when the shuffle button of your mp3 player has competely changed the way we listen to music, it makes the concept of the album as a coherent entity, rather than as a series of discrete tracks, viable again.