The importance of music to girls

"The Importance of Music to Girls" tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into - getting drunk, falling in love, cutting our hair, wanting to change the world - as well as the darker side of the adolescent years: loneliness, bullying, getting arrested.

From bubble-gum pop to classical piano to punk rock, music is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that.

It is a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them.

Greenlaw records the importance of music in her own life, from dancing on her father's shoes as a child to discovering her parents' records, buying her own, going to concerts and singing in the streets.

The personal - her school reports and diary entries, and the girl behind them - is everywhere touched by the music that compelled her generation.

Fancying Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels, wanting to be Joy Division's Ian Curtis - this is a beautiful, razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the medium of music.