While esteeming John Harris for his regular gig on The Guardian’s op-ed page, older readers will probably remember him as a Nineties-era music journalist. This particular older reader first came across him all of thirty years ago when he was cutting his teeth at Q and the New Musical Express. In those days, music journalism still counted for something, and Harris was one of its hippest young exponents. At any rate, he liked the Jam, preferred Blur to Oasis – always a good sign – and was a reliable guide to the fifty-seven varieties of the musical style known as Britpop.

With this CV, Harris would have been perfectly entitled to write one of those archetypal music journalist’s memoirs, crammed with knowing reportage from the back of the tour bus and wide-eyed accounts of how the writer hung out with Mick, Keef and co or babysat Bono’s toddlers while their father and the Edge were laying down some backing vocals. To be sure, Maybe I’m Amazed offers several vignettes from Harris’s salad days in Tin Pan Alley – I particularly liked the story of his trip round Ireland with Paul Weller – but its real subject is his teenage son James, diagnosed with autism at the age of three and influenced and inspired by music in ways that his parents are still only beginning to appreciate.

Harris’s wife, Ginny, is another veteran of the Nineties pop scene, and the domiciles in which James and his younger sister, Rosa, are raised seem to have a set of speakers in every room. Not long after James’s first birthday, Harris decides to play him the title track of Captain