The nine best music books of 2017

Which might mean that Robert Forster’s fine memoir Grant & I (Omnibus Press, £16.99), about the band he formed with his fellow songwriter Grant McLennan, will not get the readership it deserves.

A pity because this is a lovely, at times deeply moving, account of a friendship that stretched from 1977 to McLennan’s unexpected death in 2006. It also contains cross-dressing, guest appearances by everyone on Postcard Records and impoverished expat existences.

Of the bumper crop of music books published this year Forster’s might well be the most romantic. It could also be the one (written by a man at any rate) that has the least amount of testosterone running through it.

Because, man, otherwise, it is everywhere. “There are two types of people in the world,” reads the first line of Andrew O’Neill’s amusing A History of Heavy Metal (Headline, £14.99), “people who like heavy metal and dicks.”

Yet read the book and it’s quickly clear that O’Neill’s two categories have a large crossover membership.

Meanwhile, there's Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001 – 2011 (Faber, £20). In charting the stories of The Strokes, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs among others, Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the city’s music scene at the turn of the century is not short of tales of sex, drugs and ill behaviour.

This is an exhaustive read. At times exhausting too (it comes in at nearly 600 pages.) But she marshals her sources well, keeps their entries short and punchy and coaxes real candour out of her subjects.

Dylan Jones can say the same in David Bowie A Life (Preface, £20), the year’s other comprehensive oral musical history.

The editor of GQ attempts to tell the story of the man and the myth that surrounded him (and still does). To do so, he spoke to more than 180 people to build up a composite portrait of the world’s prettiest star, reflecting and refracting a life through all the usual, moreish themes; success and failure, ambition and madness, drugs and sex. (There’s a lot of polymorphous perversity on display here too, mostly to amusing ends. Mostly.)

What the book doesn’t quite do is nail down how Bowie seeded a whole generation of creatives who came after him and changed the playing field for what could be done in pop music. Still, this is a funny, enlightening, gossipy, sometimes tough read (journalist Erin Keane’s account of Bowie’s relationship with underage groupie Lori Mattix is both nuanced and outspoken).

The man is here. The myth? Well, we all have our own David Bowies in our heads.

In Memphis 68: The Tragedy of Southern Soul (Polygon, £16.99), Stuart Cosgrove offers us a map of Memphis in that most revolutionary of years, 1968. It’s a book that sits under the shadow of the tragic accidental death of soul star Otis Reading and the wilful murder of Martin Luther King.

Cosgrove’s narrative takes in the rise of black power, the power of Stax Records and Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken fast food chain. Music writing as both crime reporting and political commentary.

The politics of race and sexuality, meanwhile, are at the heart of the year’s best slice of hipster academia, Ann Powers’s striking, rather brave book Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey Street, £20).

Taking the reader from 19th-century New Orleans to the 21st-century digital landscape and from slavery to Beyonce and the Black Lives Matter campaign, Powers argues that the story of pop music in America is the story of race and sexuality and how those two things mingled and merged and often disturbed. Frankly, any book that even attempts to come to terms with, of all things, the “eroticism of the Grateful Dead” deserves some attention.

Talking about sex … “I continued to solicit modelling work, and went to see Leslie B., who ran the rubber fetish magazine Pussycat.”

Leftfield artist, musician, sometime glamour model Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art Sex Music (Faber, £14.99) is a memoir that takes her from Hull to Tate Britain, via Throbbing Gristle and the cover of Health & Efficiency.

What emerges is a portrait of a strong, capable, creative woman surrounded – and doesn’t this sound familiar? – by needy, controlling men, in this case her former musical and life partner Genesis P-Orridge.

More strong women can be found in Sam Knee’s Untypical Girls (Circada, £19.95). The visual equivalent of a Marine Girls single, this scratchy, anti-glam compilation of photographs of women in music from punk to riot grrl, from Gaye Advert to Bikini Kill, and from Arbroath to Washington DC, is a celebration of transatlantic indie feminism.

The whole thing has the air of a John Peel session circa 1991. And that’s what’s great about it.

Finally, back to the 1960s for the best memoir of the year, songwriter Jimmy Webb’s The Cake and The Rain (Omnibus Press, £20).

Webb’s abilities as a lyricist, songwriter and arranger made him a favourite songwriter of Sinatra, Glen Campbell (his best interpreter) and Waylon Jennings, but at the tail end of the 1960s the songwriter was desperate to assert his counter-cultural credentials. He grew his hair, took too many drugs and had a few too many lost weekends.

His desire to be a hippy while being loved by the squares is the pivot point for Webb’s double-tracked account of his 1960s. But for the most part the book is a glorious drift through the life of a talented, monied young man pursuing the wrong women and the wrong pleasures.

It’s not a healthy trajectory and it goes all a bit Scorsese towards the end. Think OD and California hippy noir (there’s an image of John Lennon that is just grubby). But the journey there is an anecdotal pleasure.

“There is a terrible symbiosis between cocaine and firearms,” he writes at one point. “Garth and I added a couple of AK-47s, two Browning fourteen-shot 9mm automatics, crossbows, and Bowie knives to our arsenal.”

Here’s Joni Mitchell turning up for a naked orchestral concert Webb has arranged. Here’s Jimmy driving into the middle of the Grosvenor Square riot. Here’s Jimmy in all his sweet, stupid glory.