JOHN HARRIS, the Guardian columnist and host of its Politics Weekly UK podcast, is best known for his political and music journalism. He is the author of an acclaimed pop-cultural history of the 1990s, and has won the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism, and the UK Press Award for Political Commentator of the Year. But his new book, Maybe I’m Amazed, is something of a departure: it is a highly personal story about life with his autistic son James and the life-changing effect of his son’s intense connection with the music of the Beatles, Kraftwerk, Funkadelic, the Velvet Underground, Amy Winehouse, and others.
He had never written anything so “immersive and personal” before, but the response has been positive. “You get a lovely mixture of people who appreciate and understand what the book says about music, and how magical it is. But that group intersects with parents of autistic people and autistic people themselves, who see a lot of their own experiences in it.”
The memoir tells the story of James’s childhood — its subtitle is A story of love and connection in ten songs — and the joy he finds in music. He listens, obsessively, becoming transfixed by particular tracks, and then reproduces entire songs, by ear. What is it about music that has been so transformational?
“The whole point of the magic is that you can’t articulate it,” Harris says. “The best music deals in the ineffable things that language falls short on. I think music does that sometimes in very, very obvious ways. So, there’s a bit in the book where I talk about happy-sad music. There’s an emotional state that I recognise when I play, ‘Reach out, I’ll be there’ by the Four Tops or ‘The long and winding road’ by the Beatles, or ‘Just like heaven’ by the Cure. It’s a sort of melancholia that is sometimes really nice to luxuriate in — a sort of a pleasurable sadness.” Trying to describe this in words is clunky, he says; the only way to explain it properly would be to play the track.
Being James’s father is a constant reminder of this, he says. James plays the bass and the keyboard, and is just starting to teach himself the six-string guitar. They play together. “For a long time, I thought that was a sort of a proxy for conversation, that it was like conversation. But it is conversation. There’s no difference.”
Harris familyJames enjoys the outdoors
Harris rejects the belief of the philosopher Wittgenstein that it is nonsense to talk about thought beyond language. “I don’t believe that any more, if I ever did. I think there’s lots and lots of our experiences that are beyond language, and music deals most satisfactorily with those.”
James’s formative musical influences came from the particular passions of his parents. What if their listening had been more classical than popular? Harris is not sure; but there’s something about two-or three-minute songs with their “instant, lucid punchiness” that particularly appeals to James, he says. That said, James likes jazz; “so that might be something that unfolds in the future. When we’re in the car, sometimes accidentally Classic FM is on the stereo, and he seems every bit as interested in that as he is when he’s listening to the Beatles or Kraftwerk.”
How common is this connection with music and autism? “Anecdotally, it seems, it’s reflected in the life stories of Beethoven and Mozart and Béla Bartók; you recognise a sort of cognitive style. But it’s not officially recognised anywhere.”
None the less, it is a theme that comes up a great deal during book events: parents report stories of children spending all their free time practising the guitar, for example, or listening to music. “A lot of those experiences reflect what James’s life has been like so far. I just wish that the education system recognised it more, and did something about it.”
FINDING the right support and education for James has been an enormous challenge. Now 18, he is due to start in September at a specialist FE college only five miles from home. Besides teaching work-related and life skills, the college provides outdoor learning, which appeals to Harris and his partner. “There’s something in the book about hill-walking, and how sort of centred and authentically himself James is when he’s outdoors and in the countryside. And this place caters to that,” he says. There remains “a wider set of anxieties” about his future. “Our culture doesn’t really have any room for autistic adults.”
Most Sundays, Harris and his family walk in the countryside. “I don’t want to blow our cover, but if you go walking in the countryside, there are a lot of churches around, and that’s part of the experience. I’m not a regular churchgoer, but I’ve always liked going in them,” he says. (He shares Philip Larkin’s philosophy, as set out in his poem “Church Going”: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”)
“If you walk into a village, the quickest way of soaking up its history and what sort of a place it is, is to go into the village church,” he continues. “So, I was in the habit of doing that, and my daughter, Rosa, is really into history at the most sort of granular level, local history; so she was really into doing it.”
The church-crawling habit became more appealing still after an incident when the family were walking Hadrian’s Wall to raise money for the music charity that supports the youth club that James attends. “We were in Northumbria on this lovely, sunny Friday morning, and we did what we do. We saw there was a village church; so we went in, and the organ was there, and it wasn’t locked. And I looked down and I thought, well, if I plug that in, that will work, right? And James played ‘Autobahn’ by Kraftwerk in this village church, and we very carefully unplugged it at the end and put the lid back on, and left it exactly as was.”
This discovery was the start of a new dimension to their walks. “If the organ’s open — just to re-emphasise this, we’re very, very careful — James will have a go. In fact, there’s a church near us that has a little sign telling you how to work the organ. So there are some churches that welcome it.” On occasion, they encounter the vicar. “When we’ve met, and this has happened quite a few times, they’ve always been really brilliant and helpful.”
Gareth Iwan JonesJames at the organ of St Andrew’s, Compton Bishop, in the Mendip Hills
One such encounter took place at Dore Abbey, in Herefordshire, where someone was practising a classical piece. “James was very taken with this. I said to [the organist], ‘James is autistic, and he’s very, very musical. He loves playing church organs’, and the guy let him have a go. And can you imagine, if you’re in a church that big and the organ is vast — it’s the size of a house — and James played the Smiths and Kraftwerk, strictly secular repertoire, and the whole place was filled with this lovely sound.”
On another occasion, they found themselves at St Michael’s, Mere, in Wiltshire, “one of those churches where the organ is so big you have to go up into the roof of the church and play. We met the vicar one Sunday morning, and he took us up two or three flights of stairs and said, ‘Be my guest.’ That’s wonderful. It shows you the uses beyond worship that perhaps churches can be put to. You know, there’s these amazing musical instruments on your doorstep.”
We talk about the acoustic of churches. Have they tried singing? “Again, this shows how musically curious James is. We were visiting Wells Cathedral, only about six weeks ago, and there was a choir singing in one of the chapels. This wasn’t the sort of music James is familiar with at all, and neither am I, but it was absolutely dumbfounding. We stood with our jaws on the floor for about 20 minutes, and then I went to the choir master afterwards, and said, ‘Can you tell me, what’s the genre of this music?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s Tudor choral music,’ and he showed me where to find it on Spotify.”
Unfamiliar as the music was, Harris was deeply moved. “I had this sense that there are certain musical intervals or chord changes that evoke the profound, and, in this case, the divine. And you can hear it, and it’s the most emotionally affecting thing, because, again, you’re beyond language. You could say to me, ‘Well, why? Why does that make you think of the infinite and a life beyond the everyday?’ I don’t know the answer. It just does.
“That’s another reason that we have to make sure churches don’t fall into rack and ruin, because how many places are there that have these amazing acoustics?”
Most of the churches that they visit are open, but not all, and that can be frustrating. “James now has got to the point where he says to me on a Sunday morning, when we go walking, ‘Is there a church?’” If they can’t get in, it is disappointing — although, as Harris concedes, about three-quarters of locked churches have a sign directing you to the key. “I know there are security reasons, and the people who run churches feel they have to be locked, but I also think it sort of gets you away from what churches are meant to be there for.”
Sometimes, they sit in silence. “James’s autism is manifested in his difficulties with language. I can communicate and connect with James verbally — he speaks — but we don’t have conversations as you and I would understand it, because his speech is quite staccato and brisk. Silence is part of the life we share together as father and son. I’m someone who talks too much; so that’s been a great education, in relaxing into silence, and understanding that in the best kind of silence there’s a profound connection.
“It happens to us quite a lot when we’re walking, and at first I was uncomfortable enough to try and pull language out of James, thinking, ‘Well, this can’t be right, we haven’t said a word to each other for six minutes.’ I’m all right with silence now. I’m much more comfortable with it than I was before James was born, and that’s part of how being James’s dad has changed me.”
AS A music critic, John Harris was one of those who expressed warm appreciation of Nick Cave’s 2024 album, Wild God, in which the singer reflected on love, loss and faith (Arts, 21 February). Harris — who calls himself a devout agnostic — wrote of sharing the singer’s yearning for meaning. Where does he stand on faith today?
“When what I would call militant atheism was at its most fashionable, when that Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion was a bestseller, I never really liked it, because I thought it failed to acknowledge or empathise with what people of faith experience, and part of me has always been a bit envious of people who have faith.
Harris familyJames, aged seven, at Camp Bestival, in 2014
“It’s not like I haven’t sat there and thought, ‘Well, could I acquire it?’ But I’m a sceptic; so that’s always going to get in the way. And I’m not much of a joiner-inner. But I’ve always, since I was a child, had the understanding that there are parts of human experience that you can’t really account for in that desiccated ‘Oh, it’s just neurons firing’ way. There are lots and lots of mysteries at the heart of human experience and life, and there are things that are inexplicable and awe-inspiring.
“I’ve always felt that, but I had a secular upbringing, and the older I got, the more I realised that I, like a lot of people, lacked an opportunity to come together with other human beings to understand some of these very profound aspects of life. So, loss, bereavement, rupture, coming of age — whatever they are.
“Secular society has never come up with anything to replace what the decline of organised religion has lost, and I feel that . . . the secular way of living has a lot of these gaps in it, and it’s not terribly satisfactory. So I feel a sort of yearning for those things, but I just don’t have the certainty to cross the Rubicon.”
Taking part in organised worship does not sit comfortably with him, he says. “So my version of it, which is sort of ritualistic and weekly, and, it so happens, happens on Sundays, is hill-walking. Hill-walking is when I touch the divine and the profound — yes, the profound; and occasionally it feels like it might be the divine, but I don’t know.”
Atheism doesn’t appeal. “How do you know? I don’t think you can.” There’s an arrogance in it, he says; but there can also be an arrogance in Evangelical Christians. “It happens on both sides. But I think there’s a reason why a sort of religious sensibility has been with us for as long as it has: because there are just parts of life that are all about the profound and the infinite, and we have to recognise that.”
Is there anything that the Church of England could do to be more welcoming to people in his position? “Clearly, the Church of England has all sorts of problems with scandal and with its attitudes to things that I think most modern people take for granted. But it sits in the middle of a world in which it seems like people’s yearning for a more profound experience hasn’t gone away, and there’s anecdotal evidence that [that] seems to be increasing as the world gets more and more troubled.”
What the Church can do, he says, is to be more visible — he mentions issues such as social justice — and keep its buildings open. “Keep them open, and try and find uses for churches other than worship on a Sunday morning, so that people get used to being there. And try to fulfil the Church’s mission as regards bringing people together, because you can bring people together in ways other than singing hymns and listening to sermons on a Sunday morning, as valuable as that is. There has to be more to it than that.”
Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris is published by John Murray at £16.99 (Church Times bookshop £15.29); 978-1-3998-1403-4.
John Harris will be in conversation with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen about neurodivergence and creativity at the Hay Festival on Sunday 1 June. Tickets: 01497 822629.
