There are two kinds of music. There is music for boys, which is good music. And there is music for girls, which is bad music.

It’s not true, of course. But it’s a sadly common belief.

When teen girls get upset at the breakup of their favourite band, we mock them. When the boys mourned Bowie, we devoted entire arts sections to their emotional pain. Kurt Cobain is deified and his widow, who wrote one of the greatest rock albums of their era, is damned. One Direction fans are silly little girls; Radiohead fans are cerebral music mavens.

This is not reserved for corners of the internet. Friends of mine have been told by supposed grown-ups that their musical taste is stupid and rubbish because they like pop. It’s music for girls! Ewwww!

I listen to a lot of music and go to a lot of gigs, and the greatest musical experiences of my life have involved listening to music for girls in the company of ecstatic female fans. There is an incredible joy to sharing a concert by The 1975 with ten thousand teenagers, dancing to Bananarama with two thousand middle-aged mums or having a soulless shed made magic by a few thousand glittery girls and a farewell show by Girls Aloud.

All of this probably explains why Hannah Ewens’ Fangirls is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in years. It’s about female fans of rock, of pop and of dance music, and it’s one of the warmest, most empathetic and fascinating books about any kind of music that you’ll read.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

From Beatlemania in the early 1960s to the Directioners and Beyhive of today, female music fans have long driven the objects of their affection to the dizzying heights of life-changing fame. But marginalized fan groups are never given appropriate credit. Frequently derided, their worlds and communities are self-contained and rarely investigated by cultural historians and commentators.

Yet without these people, in the past, records would have gathered dust on shelves, unsold and forgotten. Now, concerts wouldn’t sell out and revenue streams from merchandising would disappear, changing the face of the music industry as we know it.

In Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture, journalist Hannah Ewens is on a mission to give these individuals their rightful due.

What I liked about Fangirls is that it doesn’t patronise its subjects. It doesn’t make value judgements about the music the young women and non-binary people listen to; it’s about the euphoria, the camaraderie and sometimes the sadness of being a music fan.

Fandom is a powerful, extraordinary thing. It can be all-consuming, something we discover just at the time of our lives when we need to feel part of something bigger and accepting. It can help us define who we are – to this day there are particular T-shirts I can see complete strangers wearing and think, “oh yeah. One of us.” – and it can help us find friendship and connection when we’re struggling to do either in the rest of our lives. It’s a joyous and often profound thing, and Fangirls treats it as such.

Music fans of a certain age will recognise the name of Ian Penman, one of the best writers ever to work for NME (the NME of its glory days, not the shallow lifestyle brand of today). Here, the London Review of Books gets him to review two biographies of Prince. It’s an incredible article about an equally incredible story.

Even here, he glows distantly like a quasar; it’s hard to make out the lineaments of a true inner life. There is a hummingbird effect: he keeps so busy you can’t see through the blur to make any sense of why he behaves in the ways he does, or makes the decisions he does. A workaholic who writes endless songs about how much he just hangs out. A perfectionist who releases way too much sub-standard work.

My life isn’t all glamorous launches and rock concerts, you know. Sometimes I’ll stay in and read a book, usually a music one. Here are a few recent reads:

Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out by MARTIN ASTON

This is incredible. It’s the queer equivalent of Revolution In The Head, an incredibly exhaustive (592 pages!) chronicle of the history of LGBTQ musicians in modern culture.

Anything that begins with John Grant’s Glacier and segues into 1920s lesbian blues guitarists is going to win me over, and that kind of contrast is what makes the book so much fun: it’s not a dull historical tract, but a celebration of some incredible music by some equally incredible people.

It’s also a sober reminder of how much progress has happened in a very short space of time. The chapters on music in the time of the AIDS panic are particularly sobering.

UNCOMMON PEOPLE BY DAVID HEPWORTH

I’m a big fan of Hepworth, who helped create Q Magazine, Empire and the much-missed Word magazine. This felt more like a collection of one-shot magazine features than a book, though.

The uncommon people of the title are rock stars, with Hepworth giving each of his chosen ones a chapter (or in the case of The Beatles, a few chapters). He argues that the era of the rock star is over: today, even financial traders call themselves rock stars. The book is his attempt to illustrate the rise and fall of a group of people we probably won’t see the likes of again.

It’s still interesting in places but felt a little insubstantial: perhaps the problem is that it feels aimed at the kind of people who don’t normally read rock stars’ biographies for whom the tales of Fleetwood Mac, The Who and Led Zeppelin may feel sparkling and new.

PLEASE KILL ME: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK BY LEGS MCNEIL AND GILLIAN McCAIN

I hated this one.

I hated it because like most oral histories, the talking is mainly done by the people left behind by those who ascended to greater things – so it can be hard to concentrate over the sound of axes being ground.

I hated it because it’s terribly edited, giving very minor characters far too many column inches.

But the main problem I had with it is that I was reading it with a 2018/2019 sensibility. Reading about your supposed rock idols committing statutory rape, abusing groupies and generally acting like misogynist arseholes palls very quickly in our more enlightened age.

SMALL VICTORIES: THE TRUE STORY OF FAITH NO MORE BY ADRIAN HARTE

This promises to be the definitive biography of one of my favourite bands, and it’s well-researched with good access to most (but not all) of the band past and present.

But beware: it suffers from the rock-biog curse of pomposity, with some sections almost hilariously overwritten.

If you can get past that – and if you’re not a picky, whinging writer like me, you probably can – it’s probably as good a biog as FNM are going to get.