The easy fluency, nerdish charm and commercial success of 1990s pop fanboy non-fiction by Giles Smith and Nick Hornby meant that soon everyone felt they had a music memoir in them. By and large, they were wrong. Discerning readers now approach this genre with loins ironclad, since most offerings are dreary identikit faux-modest accounts of girl/boy trouble, bad haircuts and how punk rock changed one’s trousers for ever.
The two authors here both reassure, though. Alan Johnson, “the best prime minster we never had” in the opinion of many, has produced several volumes of raw and compelling autobiography already. Mark Kermode deftly and winningly manages to have one foot in knotty film criticism and one in popular entertainment. His recent BBC Four series, Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema, was the kind of bracingly old-school documentary one despaired of ever seeing again; someone who knew what they were talking about doing just that, at length, straight at us, instead of moody travelogue mid-shots and spurious “journeys”.
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