A near-300-page love letter to music, albeit music from a relatively narrow timeframe and demographic, Connection Is A Song narrates author Anna Doble’s blossoming relationship with this particular artform, giving her “feelings she has never felt before” as it goes. In a sense, though quite a different one, this book had a similar effect on me.

Doble, who now works for the BBC World Service as a presenter and editor, was born in the late 1970s and as a preteen in Yorkshire discovered football before pop, galvanised by the 1990 World Cup. In due course, school friends and older siblings and the radio introduce chart hits and random oldies into her life; Britpop, when it takes cultural hold mid-decade, feels new and exciting, with Elastica’s single Connection giving this book its title.

Underage drinking and occasional drugging happens, then Doble goes to university, continuing to expand her musical horizons with the aid of new friends and dipping a first toe into journalism by writing for the student newspaper. All this is recounted with colour, vividness and levity – it feels easy to insert yourself into these scenes and warm to the writer and her associates.

At any rate, it was easy for me, which might be because in certain respects Doble and I experienced the 1990s in extremely similar ways. The footy/indie/uni teen pipeline is a common one, no doubt, but some of the recollections offered were so familiar as to be almost uncanny, such as the bits about pulling Thursday-Friday all-nighters at Leeds Student to make the print deadline. (Us down in Cardiff at the same time were exceedingly bitter about the greater funds available to that publication.)

Doble’s awakening sexuality, as alluded to in the subtitle, is an experience I can’t claim a share of – until the very end of Connection…, it’s only coyly hinted at, which was presumably how it went down at the time. Well-written and touching, this memoir is sure to provide relatable content for a lot of people. The flipside of which is that I don’t think Anna Doble’s youth was any more noteworthy than mine, and the idea of writing a book about it isn’t a feeling I’ve ever felt before.