Features Sing Your Life: Music Autobiographies

On the week that The Charlatan’s Tim Burgess released his autobiography, ‘Tellin’ Stories’, complete with torrid tales of the Manchester baggy legends merrily blowing coke up each other’s arses, it set our mind to all those other tales of rock excesses that we’ve loved over the years. In the spirit of Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’, we decided to make a top five list. In no particular order then, here’s five great memoirs that you ought to download to your kindle, or if you’re feeling old skool, pick up the actual book. Imagine.

Giles Smith: Lost In Music
Oh, the sweet sweet smell of success. Thankfully for us, this book contains none of that, rather it’s curried with the definitive stench of failure. But who could fail to love a book that opens with the line: “In the spring of 1989, shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, as I stood in the sleet at a bus-stop in Colchester, it dawned on me that I had probably, all things considered, failed in my mission to become Sting”? Charting one man’s downward trajectory from schoolboy pop hopeful (laughing over his cornflakes at his mother’s suggestion that the band he formed with his brothers be given the dowdy moniker ‘The Smiths’), to a final cruel dumping by his record label, after the Cleaners From Venus’ sophomore album somehow managed the feat of selling less than the pitiful sales of their debut, by way of Nik Kershaw and a healthy dose of music obsession. If you only ever read one rock autobiography, you could do a lot worse than this.

Louise Wener: It’s Different For Girls
At the height of Britpop, Louise Wener managed to singlehandedly coin the term ‘Sleeper Blokes’, purely by being such good interview fodder that the other members of her band became anonymous. Now, a lesser person might take the maulings that followed opening her mouth as a good reason to never say anything in public again, but not our Louise, who tells tales of awkward teenage years spent choosing between spending pocket money on either moonboots or Human League albums, to stealing Blur’s cheeseboard and ignoring the sage advice given to her by Damon Albarn: never sleep with your band-mates. Oops.

Motley Crue: The Dirt
The ultimate rock confessional? Almost certainly, and not one for the faint of heart, either. Detailing the band’s journey from the ‘Motley House’, which by all accounts sounds like it would’ve made a genuine contender for an hour long ‘Life Of Grime’ special, to stadium rock dominance, with as much rock star excess as it’s physically possible to handle without actually dying. Yes, it’s torrid and tawdry, and the band do themselves no favours in the likeability stakes, but there are a few moments of surprising sensitivity (particularly Vince Neil’s passages about the death of his young daughter from cancer). And at least no one can accuse them of not being honest.

Bez: Freaky Dancin’: Me And The Mondays
As a rock star autobiography, we’re torn as to whether this even really fits the brief, given Bez merely danced around and shook his maracas, but since it’s frankly hilarious, we don’t actually care. Chronicling his part in the band that helped define the chemical generation, Bez takes us through his relatively normal childhood, followed by a ‘difficult’ period (read: jail), and disappearing off travelling, before meeting one Shaun Ryder and jumping onstage at the Hacienda, completely off his noggins. Sadly, the tome stops short of that ‘Ghost Hunting With The Happy Mondays’ programme (one of television’s finest hours). Shame.

Luke Haines: Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In It’s Downfall
Luke Haines may have really only teetered on the edge of what one might describe as ‘success’ as a musician (with the Auteurs losing out on the Mercury Music Prize to Suede, short by one vote), but this view from the periphery is so weighted with bile aimed at everyone around him, and there can be few greater pleasures in life than reading Haines laying into Justine Frischmann. Bitter, savage and downright hilarious, Haines dissects and dismisses the scramble of his contemporaries for success and power, from the position of someone whose own talents and inspirations are all stripped away by the industry, whilst his ego remains wholly unaffected. It gets thrown around a lot, but this genuinely is the kind of book you’ll finish in one sitting.