How I emerged from trauma to regain my ear for music

What happened five years ago, however, was to profoundly affect his life. He suddenly lost his hearing and was plunged into a form of aural hell of constant white noise. The journey from private torment in a hospital bed to a renewed faith in life and music is explored in detail in his memoir, The Train in the Night.

“What it is, in short, is no hearing at all in one side,” says the 52-year-old. “It resulted in humongous tinnitus and balance issues which needed to be resolved. A couple of neuroscientists have been interested in my case. I had worse cortical difficulties than people often do with my condition.”

That Coleman’s illness took months to accurately diagnose added to his distress.

“I had to demand to be re-referred to specialist hospitals. As soon as I began seeing people who seemed to give a toss then I started to get better, but I had six to eight months in serious despair.”

Coleman’s book seesaws between those traumatic months in 2007 and his formative musical experiences, growing up in the Fens. Its structure, he explains, was influenced by the Dr Oliver Sacks, the psychologist who taught him to re-programme his brain by listening again to music.

An integral part of Coleman’s teenage musical education in the 1970s was progressive rock – in particular the work of Yes and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis.

“There’s no particular reason [why I liked prog rock]; I happened to fall in at a bus stop with a gang who were into it. Essentially I’m a rock’n’roller. I grew tired of [prog rock] in 1975, but I’m definitely of the prog rock generation. There were very few alternatives when you were 13.”

A pivotal year for Coleman was 1975 which saw the release of key albums such as Physical Graffiti, Blood on the Tracks, Horses, Bob Marley and the Wailers Live and Born to Run. “I was 15 in ’75,” he explains. “I talk in the book a lot about the ways in which you make the progression through your teenage years. Fifteen is an important year for boys hormonally and socially and in terms of your sexual capability. You start to experience the world more fully. I deluded myself that I was a full-grown person.”

Another area Coleman looks at in detail is how people’s musical tastes evolve. “What I’m trying to suggest in the book is if you take music seriously enough to explore it deeply you will find some interesting stuff about yourself,” he says. He “loathes” the trend, in the digital age, of “treating music as take-it-or-leave-it”. “The idea that you take music as you would Louis Vuitton handbags, that you can dispose of it, it’s wrong. It’s like little dogs, music is for life, not just for Christmas.”

The key chapter in the book focuses on religious music. It’s a subject rarely discussed in rock’n’roll memoirs but, having been brought up in a “low 
Church of England” household, hymns and carols were as 
much the soundtrack of Nick Coleman’s early life as Nazareth or Yes. Though now “technically agnostic,” he says: “I love church music – I always have, I always will do. I was not oppressed by religion, I was not forced to learn it parrot-fashion. It seemed to me to offer deeper understanding of the world.”

We talk about Coleman’s road to recovery. A keen Arsenal fan, he found something remarkably restorative in the hubbub of a football crowd.

“It was a completely insane thing to do – I’d been flat on my back for three months, I needed two sticks to go three yards and a passed out the first time I went, but it’s that old Nietzschean thing: that which does not kill you makes you stronger.”

Another turning point is when he began singing again – to an Amy Winehouse song – while on the loo. “The point about it was it was the first time that I was singing completely unconsciously.”

The Train in the Night ends with a giant list of his musical loves, starting with the Rolling Stones. “It all poured out in one gush in a single afternoon,” he says. “It’s like a gravestone, ‘Here lies Nick Coleman, you can define him in these terms.’

“I found myself quite emotional at the end of it. Lists have a function. Nick Hornby understand the power of lists. We share this view. The list is a real thing in our experience.”

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Nick Coleman appears at Ilkley Playhouse on October 11, 7.30pm. 01943 816714, www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk