Over the summer, I spent some happy evenings surrounded by stacks of CDs, skipping through the first few seconds of each track, smiling nostalgically and scribbling notes. This was in aid of the Rough Guide to Playlists, published this month. The book contains 500 lists, divided by artist, by genre, by subject: songs about rivers, songs about birds, songs about the colour blue. There are Billy Bragg's favourite busking songs and Richard Thompson's favourites from the past 1,000 years. Suitably for such a trainspotterish exercise, Nick Hornby, the patron saint of listmaking after High Fidelity and 31 Songs, himself picks "10 great songs you might not know".
About 20 of the lists are mine. There is a man, the editors must have thought, who knows his oud from his bendir. But as I started to compile lists and suggest new topics, their messages became increasingly alarmed. "Hmm . . . there's some dusty relics indeed surfacing," came one response, to lists that included the Eurythmics and Al Stewart. "Aqualung?! Bloody Hell!" greeted my Jethro Tull recommendations. Cat Stevens, alas, never made the final cut. I had strayed into the territory of guilty pleasures.
Hierarchies of taste have several descending levels. The sanctified works of the canon offer little room for debate. (There is no playlist of the top six Bach cello suites.) Then there are the obscurer works that we genuinely think are good even though - or perhaps because - they are overlooked. Any fool can point you towards 10 good Beatles songs, after all. But pointing out listen-able songs by Supertramp or Blue Oyster Cult demonstrates arcane skill.
Below the underground canon are the guilty pleasures, which are not the same as those in the so-bad-it's-good category. Nor are they like gastronomic guilty pleasures (bad for you but taste good). A guilty pleasure cannot be deliberate - its hallmark is an unfortunate, off-key sincerity. Like a good Persian rug, to be truly lovable an artwork must contain a tiny flaw.
The essence of a guilty pleasure is that it is something you know to be flawed but love anyway. My list would include the Corrs, Vaughan Williams, immense quantities of science fiction, A Matter of Life and Death and Stanley Spencer. ("The Resurrection at Cookham", in Tate Britain's rehang, lords it over paintings from Cookham and St Ives rather than mingling diffidently with religious works from the Renaissance.) Everyone's individual hall of shame says something distinctive about the person who enjoys it. Martin Amis's affection for Hannibal Lecter, or Graham Greene's writings on Shirley Temple, reveal more than they think.
Why do we indulge in guilty pleasures? Most of us could compile lists of great novels we have not read, great works of music we have never heard, artistic masterpieces we have not seen. With limited lives left to live, why do we read pabulum, watch trash, listen to fluff? It is for the same reason that we do not walk solely on mountain tops. A guilty pleasure gives fresh insight into the chilly perfection of similar but uncompromisingly great work.
To take guilty pleasure requires a genuine love of the genre. It derives some of its poignancy from the way in which it aims at the mark and misses, and to appreciate that requires a knowledge of the conventions and achievements of its genre. I look forward more to seeing the libertarian space opera Serenity because of having enjoyed, despite its conspicuous failings, that thumping mixture of Gibbon and Riefenstahl, Revenge of the Sith. For another example, Spinal Tap is reasonably amusing to civilians as a tale of stupidity; to acolytes of heavy metal, it is painfully funny because of the devoted care evident in the parodies. It is both hard and pointless to parody anything you do not truly love. And love is, notoriously, blind.
