I’m delighted to report that Mark Kermode’s Surround Sound: The Stories of Movie Music is now available in all good bookshops in paperback form. It has a fancy new cover design – thanks, as ever, to Stuart Wilson in the Picador design team – so it will look fabulous on your bookshelf.

I’m even more delighted to report that it’s been selected to be the Blackwell’s Non-Fiction Book of the Month! They’ve described it as ‘a glorious paean to the power of film music, relating both its history as well as the emotional connection which audiences feel to it, and including a wide-ranging survey of some of the greatest composers of film music over the decades’.

Mark and I are really proud of it and we’re both very excited to know that more readers will be joining us on a deep dive into the world of film scoring.

Even more excitingly, we’ve had quite a few requests for a playlist to accompany the book and I finally got round to compiling one. Totalling 236 cues and over 13 hours, it’s fairly thorough, although it doesn’t include every single score or composer mentioned in the book – that would be a bit much! – partly because Spotify has some original score blank spots, such as Brazil and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and music by Shirley Walker, Wendy Carlos and Suzanne Ciani.

The pieces are in chronological order to where they feature in the book and I limited the Soundtrack Selections to 3 cues per score.

As you might imagine, it’s a wonderfully varied and epic listen. After you’ve immersed yourself in it, why not treat yourself to some physical soundtracks for your collection? I highly recommend La-La Land Records and Invada for film music gems.