Music and Autism

A superb new book by John Harris

I recently interviewed John Harris about his book Maybe I’m Amazed; an account of how his son, James - who was diagnosed with autism at the age of three - develops an intense relationship with music.

You may well know John Harris from his journalism, his book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English rock, and/or his work in The Guardian, including the series of video reports out and about in the country called ‘Anywhere but Westminster’.

Maybe I’m Amazed is his very personal account of how music has become a central part of James's life, and also a key bond between him and his Dad, and the rest of the family. This interview was conducted at Waterstones, Deansgate, Manchester on Wednesday, 16th April 2025.

Photo Eve Holt, via Twitter

I thought if we start with a bit of context about James's experiences with autism before we move on and talk specifically about the music element. He was diagnosed age three; when you looked back, were there traits from his earliest years that made sense after the diagnosis?

Yes, in retrospect there were signs that James might be autistic. But we only realised what they were when we moved from Wales to Somerset and James’s nursery said we should get him checked out, and I think they mentioned the ‘a’ word. One of the most painful aspects of that was realising that a lot of the things we’d thought of as magical and quite amazing – and we subsequently returned to find them magical and quite amazing – were rendered problematic by James’s autism was presented to us by a lot of the people we were dealing with. It was like getting a big weight dropped on you, and everything is very negative.

What kind of things had you considered magical?

Like the fact that James is hyperlexit – which comes with autism very often, it’s quite a miraculous thing. It means you have this amazing facility with letters and numbers and spelling. James taught himself to spell when he was three. My partner went to a charity shop and bought this thing called My First Computer or something - it’s like a toy laptop or something - and it had twenty games on it and by trial and error he taught himself to spell. And, in terms of music, he looked me fiercely in the eye one day when wasn’t even two and he sang ‘Paperback Writer’ to me, verbatim.

But then, disappointingly, when the diagnosis comes and you start to visit the autism professionals in the NHS, they don't talk about any of that positive magic, it’s all about deficiencies, deficits, problems...

Yes, they would come around eventually, but there was a period prior to the diagnosis being formally given, when we'd get these visits to the house by people with a big box of paraphernalia, like bricks to build towers out of and plastic coins to put in slots, and suddenly your three year-old is sitting is sitting tests - I mean, that’s what was happening - and I knew watching him that he was failing. And they were going “Can’t do that… can’t do that… can’t do that”. And that’s the way it would be presented to you. And it was really hard.

Things like so-called “self-stimulatory behaviour” which on some occasions were his hands flapping. My mother-in-law, God rest her soul, used to say “James is trying to fly again”. And no-one we knew said “That’s self-stimulatory behaviour…”

(NOTE - Self-stimulatory behaviour is when someone repetitively engages in a movement such as flapping their hands, or rocking or humming to self-soothe or cope with sensory input. This behaviour is particularly common in people with autism)

They said a speech therapist could come for an hour every three months.

Yeah. The thing is, I work for The Guardian, right? So I've got this sort of somewhat misplaced belief that the public sector is great, and will always sort you out. And that's true, you know, if you break your leg. We had some idea that they would sort us out with whatever autism entails; but that just wasn’t the case. The paediatrician said “Come back in a few years and we'll really know what we're dealing with”. Terrible. As soon as you’re on Google everything you see stresses early intervention; early intervention is key.

I sound angry while I'm recounting this but it's true. We didn't get so much as a pamphlet. So anything we subsequently learned about autism we had to find out for ourselves; again, this is a fairly common experience, even now.

You write about frantically Googling…

It's Google all the time, and the problem with Googling is it that takes you to the worst possible explanation for everything; so if you've got a headache, you've got a brain tumour and we all know that right? There were Information gaps. It’s not in the book this, but we were at Camp Bestival – the family festival in Dorset - and no-one had told to us about autism and sudden and extreme noise and that most autistic people have an adverse reaction to it. We took James to the Wheel of Death, which is where motorcycles go around your head at high speed. And he looked like he'd seen twenty ghosts simultaneously. No-one had said, "Watch out for extraneous noise." So that side of it was really, really, difficult.

I mean, some of it's to do with scarcity and a lack of money, and all of that; one has to be fair. But I think there is a cultural problem within a lot of the public sector with how autism and the parents of autistic people and autistic people themselves, how they're treated and how much information is given.

I personally think we need a national autism service; so many people are diagnosed now that there should be something there that signposts you and puts you on a sort of firm foundation of what it is that's in your life.

Then you struggle then with the Statutory Assessment before James is supposed to go to school where you have obstacles…

They just turned us down.

They don't want to provide the special requirements in a school but eventually you do get there.

His autism is kind of intense, right? I don't like words like “severe” and “profound”, but you'd know James is autistic as soon as you met him. They just said, “No, we're not doing that”. And they sent us this pile of photocopies. The doorbell rang one morning, and the postman was there. And he had two of the biggest envelopes I've ever seen. And it was just a pile of random photocopied bumf, some of which was about autism and some wasn't. And that was what the council sent us. And that was their response.

So you hadn’t got a pamphlet and then you had several hundred shit pamphlets.

We had to get a lawyer then and threaten them with a tribunal.

One thing about the book is that it comes in close to your experience and to your family and to James but then pulls out at certain points, and the wider issues that we're talking about now are discussed and then it goes back into the music and James. There are couple of things that you talk about autism generally that were things that I'd not heard about and maybe we can share them with the audience. One of them is the concept of fractionated.

Yes. Fractionated traits. I didn't know about this until I was writing the book. In writing the book, because it's a memoir a lot of it is me drawing on my own experiences, but also - although they’re not quoted because it isn’t journalism - in order to enhance my understanding of autism I went to speak to quite a few experts. And one of them, Francesca Happé, is one of the leading authorities on autism. She has this set of very accurate observations about how autism works genetically. She talks about autistic traits being fractionated. I do quote her once. She has explained it in patterns that recur in autistic person’s family tree. She says - “Often there will be a child that’s diagnosed and then there will be a great aunt who was a bit of a hermit, who didn’t like to be around other people, and there will be a grandfather engineer eye for detail, happy to eat the same thing for lunch every day - who was socially unremarkable but who didn’t like change”.

As she sees it, “different genetic lines come together to create that magical admixture that is autism”. Now, my father was a nuclear engineer who commenced his working life as an academic at the Simon Engineering Laboratories, as was, on Oxford Rd in about 1962 and apart from coming home for his dinner every night finally left that building when he retired. He’d eat lunch at one o’clock every day. The voice on Radio 4 had to announce “The world at one…”, and then he’d have his cup-a-soup. The proportion of the grandchildren of engineers who get an autism diagnosis is pretty high. My grandmother, who was a coal miner’s wife from the South Wales valleys if people came round to the house after twenty minutes she would just explode in rage; she couldn’t cope with it. That really rang true. And if I talk to people family tree that stuff does recur.

So, what about in terms of relating to you?

Inevitably in the course of being James's Dad understood that I have some traits. I don't think I'm autistic. I don't think I'd meet the criteria for diagnosis, but I hate extraneous noise, which is a very autistic thing. If anyone starts whistling on a train, I want to kill them! Or if there's an extractor fan in a hotel room down the corridor from me, I ain't going to get any sleep. I've memorized every phone number anyone's ever told me which is ridiculous. Four, three, ****, three, one, ****, seven; that woman there (points to a former teacher of his). That means I have some of that stuff.

And also maybe, you know, as a successful musician journalist, we all have a little bit of a trainspotter side; we call it trainspotting, don't we, you know. Knowing stuff about the b-sides of singles and the minutiae of things.

Yeah, to write about music for a living, one has to be profoundly obsessed. It's sort of barmy, right? To clock on every day at work and think about the Senseless Things, and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, and whoever. I mean, that's the way that I lived. But that's kind of odd, right? You know, your entire waking hours were completely focused on music.

There’s a lot of that, and then musicians are a whole other thing. I’ve realised in retrospect that there was this parallel set of often quite virtuoso skills, musical skills or technological skills – things like being able to work a recording studio without even thinking about it - running alongside a set of things that many musicians clearly found very difficult; socializing, conversation. Every third interview is like pulling teeth; people didn’t want to be there, talking about what they do.

If you want to zoom into the arena of musicians, I can talk about this forever. Brian Wilson, Beethoven, Nick Drake. I’m not saying they’re autistic…

David Byrne.

David Byrne says he's autistic, so one can say that about him. But I think there are so many of the traits that together bundle up into this thing we call autism, which lend themselves to musicality. And my son, among millions of other people, is an example of that.

I like the interactions between you, including when James starts firing Pop quiz questions at you. And, of course, you know most of the answers. So it's like, “What label released Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin?” The answer, of course, you know.

Yeah, sometimes he knows as well. It’s become a certain ritual that happens. I’m not even awake sometimes and he says “What was the second Beatles film?” and I have to say Help and he'll say “Released in?” and I go “1965” and then all is well with the world. That’s how it works.

Let’s talk about his development in responding to music.

Very early on, prior to James being diagnosed, there was the ‘Paperback Writer’ experience, and also things on the flip side of that; so not just joyously responding to music. When James was about one and a half, I played him the title track of Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, because I thought it sounded like when the monsters come out in The Muppets, you know The Muppets used to have these big monster numbers they sound like Captain Beefheart and I put that on, it's full of discords, notes that don't fit together and he looked absolutely terrified and effectively looked at me as if to say “Never play this to me again”.

In general, then, this amazing sensitivity for sound and the positive and joyous aspects were this connection to music. The negative ones were not just Captain Beefheart but hand dryers in toilets, police sirens, barking dogs, train announcements on stations. And you know, some autistic people have ear defenders on when they go out into the world because the sheer sound, you know, is often too much to bear. In James's case, music was this amazing point of connection.

So all those things happened. And then I had these things that were just brilliantly and beautifully very funny. I had this three year old kid who was obsessed with Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople. And then when he was four - this is all from an iPod that he learned out of work when he was about two, and he would quite judiciously choose things on it – he started playing Kraftwerk. The first thing was the Beatles. Then Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople. Then the Clash, I think; three songs from London Calling. And then Kraftwerk. And Kraftwerk was as big as the Beatles, which is right; I mean, there are two quartets in history for me, who sort of changed everything.

It was interesting that the way that he would listen, like with ‘I Am the Walrus’ for example - which I can understand, I can understand him loving that - but he would listen to it in ten second segments?

Yeah, he would move through it. So he did the first twenty seconds of ‘I Am the Walrus’ up to when the vocal comes in, then he did up to the first chorus, then - I mean imagine listening to it thirty-seven times a day or thereabouts! - and then finally after about six weeks he'd reached the end and he would be alright listening to the whole thing. And he did that with ‘Autobahn’, and ‘The Robots’ and ‘Computer World’ and ‘London Calling’ and ‘Rudy Can't Fail’.

I subsequently discovered, with absolute certainty, that he hears things in music that most people don’t. Once I’d come to that realisation, of course you’d listen to ‘I Am the Walrus’ thirty-seven times because as one of the musicologists I went to speak to told me it's like looking at a painting when you're on LSD to mere mortals; that's what it's like and ‘I Am the Walrus’ as you say, it's in there. I mean no-one's gonna listen to a record by the Kooks thirty-seven times a day, God love them right? ‘I Am the Walrus’ is worthy of it and I think ‘Autobahn’ is worthy of it and I think ‘London Calling’ is worthy of it and most of the other records that have become James's signature tunes are worthy of it.

I know people who never listen to music which always bothers me. I remember Bruce Mitchell saying to me that what most peoples’ relationship with music is, is that it's just wallpaper. But then also a lot of people have an intense relationship to music of course. Then you have intensity and the vivid way that that James seems to experience music is you know…

Neuro-diverse is a description, of the whole of humanity; that’s what it means. All of our brains are wired in different ways, and there are generalizations you can make which tie certain cognitive styles together - and autism is one of those. We also have more colloquial ways of talking about people being “obsessives” or being “introverts” or “extroverts”, all of those things right, and there’s no question after all these years of human evolution we're very, very different and that clearly applies to how we process sound.

One of the most amazing things which happened after I started writing the book, was I started doing my research and I was reminded that a disproportionate number of autistic people have what's called absolute pitch or perfect pitch.

(NOTE – as John points out in the book, among professional musicians, the proportion with absolute pitch is said to be around one in twenty, the same as it is among autistic people)

James, when he hears a song, instantly absorbs what key it's in. I'll ask him what key is ‘Can You Get to That’ by Funkadelic in, and he just goes “E flat”, and he just knows. And straight away, I thought, "Wow, you hear music in a way that I cannot really fathom," right? It must have almost like three dimensions. If it's carrying that amount of information, that as you're listening to it, you go, "Now he's playing A, now he's playing C sharp, now it's F," and you understand how all those notes fit together. Can you imagine hearing it like that? It's like being inside a sculpture or something.

One thing, is that music seems to put James in a euphoric state in some instances. There's a passage where you talk about going to the Blue Dot Festival to see Kraftwerk with him is just brilliant.

This is where I might cry.

It stunned me just reading it and what it illustrated to me is something that you say in the book you describe it as the golden rule of autism; even if someone can't express their emotional responses it doesn't mean that they don't have any.

That Kraftwerk thing was the greatest gig I’ve ever seen because I watched it through his eyes and the great thing about Kraftwerk is they don't improvise, they don't come on late, there's no lead guitar player to wank-on for half an hour; none of that happens. It's ‘Autobahn’, it lasts for about six minutes, and there's a VW Beetle behind him going down the road. Now it's ‘The Robots’ and there are the robots. And they end with ‘Musique Non Stop’ because they always do and that's it and it's just great. And it happened not far from here and it was just the most amazing thing.

What have you learned about yourself through being James's Dad?

My relationships with music, specifically?

Well, maybe…

There are, I mean, there are answers to that that are about my understanding of human difference, which is huge, you know; I'm a completely different person in that regard now. On a daily level, if I’m in a queue at WH Smith and there’s a person taking ages to buy the paper in the morning and put the money in the machine I don't, you know, sigh and huff anymore. I might have done once, I think. All those things. So my appreciation of human difference is completely transformed.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was I reached a point that it was bursting to get out because it wasn't music journalism really; it’s a different thing. One thing we never wrote about was how music makes us feel and how that connects us. We had to turn up and ask the guy from the band who we heard had a heroin habit. Who cares if he has a heroin habit?

The conversations that we have with each other tend to be how the music makes us feel on those joyous occasions when it connects us, and I hadn't really written about that stuff before so that again is completely transformed, and I'm more aware than I ever was of this thing without which my life, my life with my son, my family life - being here, whatever – would just be unthinkable. And all of these amazing people who made the music; that’s the other thing

We meet Ian Hunter in the book when he turns up in Frome to play and I've got this son who since the age of three was obsessed with Ian Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople and there he is, can you imagine? Prior to that I’d have said “Oh tell me about David Bowie writing ‘All the Young Dudes’” and all I wanted to do is kiss him. I just wanted to tell him about this amazing thing. He was very, very funny about it. I told him my son plays your songs every hour of every day and he said “I’m sorry about that”! (audience laughter)

I really like your video contributions to The Guardian, the ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series. I used contact you and suggest you do more but can I just say though that I now realise about the stuff that you were dealing with at home, and I had the audacity to be like, “Go and get your ass to Stoke”. I think being a parent in the situation you’re in is something that I think takes a lot of bravery and resilience. I take the hat off to you for that.

Thank you, Dave. I don’t think I like that phrase “check your privilege” because it sort of underestimates the things that all of us go through because all of us go through ruptures and shocks and things that we didn't think were gonna happen and all of that, they're universal experiences. You have to be resilient and all that. But, you know, we weren’t single parents, English is our first language, I have an email address which has Guardian.com which can be quite handy sometimes; I’m aware of all those things…

The fella I make those films with has an autistic daughter and his Dad’s a software engineer. So, in between going to places like Stoke, we would have these quite intense conversations in the car about these things, and keep each other going, and still do, so it didn't feel like one kind of got in the way of the other really. As strange as it may sound, sometimes getting immersed in people voting for Brexit was like going on holiday.

During the audience questions, John told us about James taking up bass guitar and learning to play keyboards – and, quite recently, if he’s in a church and the organ is unlocked he enjoys playing the Smiths or Kraftwerk on the organ (including playing it at Dore Abbey in Herefordshire). John also talked about ‘I’m Waiting for The Man’.

So when he was nine or ten and we'd come through the last of those battles with officialdom, his speech therapist suggested he should have music lessons and that happened, and that was playing keyboards, and that was his way into school productions and all that. And then when lockdown happened he just prior to that had started picking up my acoustic guitar and plucking out bass lines. And slightly craftily because his sister's a brilliant drummer. I thought well if you play the bass James we've got a band here because I play the guitar. He got quite good at playing bass, and his keyboard skills have sort of reached the point now he can accompany himself on the piano.

He just loved ‘I’m Waiting for The Man’ from the get-go. He likes repetitive music, but then I do as well. There's a reason why there's so many Krautrock fans, and people like the Velvets, and that applies to techno as well. I mean, do you have that sense with techno sometimes, that there is a pleasure in the repetitiousness of it?

Well, when the Government wanted to ban raves at the beginning of the 1990s, they described raves as being places where “repetitive beats” were being played; that was their description of techno.

Yeah. Because it's mesmeric, and it has a sort of soothing quality…

Trance…

Which is a genre, right? So without waiting for the man, he found it, James found it, and played it a lot, and then learned it phonetically. The high point of his inclusion in school was when they did a school talent show without winners and losers. Like a school production. And they asked James to take part, and, in case anything happened, I said, “Well, I'll play acoustic guitar”. So we did it. And we played ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. And we played ‘I'm Waiting for The Man’, which is about scoring heroin in Harlem.

And James did the vocals like Mark E Smith. I had no idea this was going to happen. He went, “Up to Lexington, one, two, five uh” (impersonates Mark E Smith). I was just like, "Wow”. It was the most amazing thing. And brought the house down. He had an Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground banana t-shirt on. It was the most amazing thing. So, I am so fond of that song, you have no idea. And it's ceased to be about scoring heroin in Harlem. To me, it's about a summer's evening at Oakfield Academy in Frome, and me having one of the most joyous experiences in my life.

Buy Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris, avoiding the tax avoiders; https://www.waterstones.com/book/maybe-im-amazed/john-harris/9781399814034

Dave Haslam’s Substack articles, recommnded reading;

.