Iain Banks

When you are the older brother, you get quite a few years of being better at stuff. Pretty much all of the time, you are the one who is showing how it's done, whatever it happens to be.

Sometime in our teens, though, that relationship with my brother, Wol, began to shift, most obviously when he decided to ignore my passion for electronic pop music. Whereas I was focussed almost exclusively on music made in or after 1978 - Kraftwerk being the honourable exception - he placed no such limitation on his eclectic taste. For quite a while, I think our only overlap was David Bowie, and even then my preference was, unlike his, limited to the so-called 'Berlin Trilogy'.

By the time we were at university, I was way, way past thinking my age lent my opinion on cultural matters any extra weight, which was just as well as well as Wol proved to be a great source of new music, books, and films, that, in that pre-Internet age, I might never have come across.

It was he who introduced me to Iain Banks, initially via his debut novel, "The Wasp Factory'. Some time later, Wol went to see Iain at a reading and book-signing in York. Wol bought me this copy of 'Espedair Street' and Iain signed it. I was entertained by the reference to 'Spinal Tap' - "These go to 11' - but also moved that Wol had told Iain enough about me to get the little message at the bottom of the page. (I was in a band called Halo Jones at the time.)

I found this book today on Hannah's bookshelf, when I dropped her back at university. I'd had a mild panic recently when I thought I'd lost it; I couldn't believe I'd have lent it to anyone. It says something that I'd let Hannah take it out of my house!