Bobby Gillespie, Rickie Lee Jones and Black Sabbath: The Music Books of the Year

At the time the former Pogues frontman was dosing himself with LSD and speed and his friend and landlady Kathy MacMillan walked in on him to find that he’d slashed her furniture to bits with said sword. “I was a fool to let him have that,” she admitted to Balls.

Well, quite. In a year of excessive behaviour in music memoirs (I know, I know, what’s new?), Balls’s very readable account of the messy, reckless life of MacGowan might take the Hobnob, despite some strong competition from the likes of Bobby Gillespie and Barry Adamson.

This may be an authorised version, but Balls doesn’t hide any of the chaos that embraced Shane MacGowan’s life in the wake of the success of Fairytale of New York in 1987. In MacGowan’s case, that played out in a lifestyle of addiction and poor mental health which, for all the hijinks, makes much of this account in the end a rather sad story.

Balls, for all his admiration for MacGowan, doesn’t shy away from his failings. The MacGowan who emerges from these pages appears a deeply damaged man with an almost pathological fear of confrontation. The talent is given its due as is only right, but you do put the book down wondering about the cost.

(You might also put it down thinking that Always on My Mind, the Pet Shop Boys cover version of the Elvis song that kept Fairytale of New York off the number one spot is a much better record than either MacGowan, or Balls for that matter, allow.)

There is also plenty of pain on show in both Will Sergeant’s memoir Bunnyman (Constable, £20) and Barry Adamson’s Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars (Omnibus Press, £20), though in both cases music provides more of an escape route.

Sergeant, guitarist with Echo and the Bunnymen, offers a powerful account of growing up in a post-war Liverpool with a war-damaged father. Adamson’s, however, is the more revealing. Up the road from Sergeant in Manchester, he was a mixed-race kid in a racist country. Punk and post-punk was his ticket out. He joined Magazine and later the Birthday Party before becoming a composer in his own right.

Along the way he writes revealingly about his relationships with Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Linder and Nick Cave. He is honest about all of them. But he’s also honest about himself. And that’s surely the biggest challenge.

The best thing I can say about Bobby Gillespie’s memoir Tenement Kid (White Rabbit, £20) – and to be clear, this is a compliment – is that it is very Bobby Gillespie.

It’s a book so reverent about rock ’n’ roll, so hopped up on socialistic hedonism (or hedonistic socialism), and at times so full of self-regard that you feel you should maybe put on leather trousers just to read it.

The result veers between riotous and, yes, occasionally ridiculous. But the writing is vivid throughout (Gillespie is particularly strong on Glasgow decrepitude in the 1970s.)

And if there are moments when you feel a little browbeaten by Gillespie’s sermons on the power of rock ’n’ roll, the book never loses its carnivalesque vitality. The result is hugely entertaining albeit sometimes wrong-headed. But the wrong-headedness is part of the fun. It gives you something to argue with.

Gillespie spends much of Tenement Kid riffing on the occult power of rock n roll, but it’s possible that the novelist Rachel Kushner manages to sum it up a little more succinctly.

Writing about cult band The Gun Club in Long Players (Bloomsbury, £12.99), she notes: “The first four Gun Club records still remind me of adolescence, of the desire to break something and/or be destroyed, a destruction that for a young person transmits as hope because it is energy.”

Kushner is just one of 50 authors and musicians who contribute to Long Players, edited by Tom Gatti. The subtitle “Writers on the albums that shaped them,” tells you what to expect. It’s a book that can trace its origins back to a New Statesman column, and, as a result, these essays are sometimes frustratingly short. But time and again they do nail why music matters to those of us who don’t make it.

And sometimes with a painful eloquence. The poet Daljit Nagra, writing about Meat is Murder by The Smiths, notes at one point, “Like Larkin, I’d have Morrissey leave the limelight, so I can love the best work before he smashes the shopfront of his own great tenderness.” As fine a distillation of the distance the band’s frontman has travelled between then and now as I could imagine.

Perhaps the most wide-ranging music book of the year is Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh (Canongate, £20) It is also, as you might expect from a New Yorker contributor, one of the most elegantly written too.

Sanneh’s essays on rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop offer thoughtful, inevitably US-centric takes (we’ll forgive him thinking Shirley Bassey is English. People in glass houses and all that …). He also acknowledges that music is still being made in the 21st century (Cardi B and Billie Eilish both get a mention) while paying surprising attention to the notion of “rockism” – an attack on the traditional idea of a rock band – as popularised by Pete Wylie of Mighty Wah! Way back at the start of the 1980s.

Another example of popster intellectualism from this year comes from Peter Stanfield who tackles the overlap of pop music and pop art at the height of the 1960s in A Band With Built-In Hate (Reaktion Books, £15.99). This account of The Who up to the arrival of punk concentrates on Pete Townsend’s ideas rather than Keith Moon’s treatment of TVs and cars and is the better for it.

The Who turn up in both Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music 1968 to the Present (Reaktion Books, £20) by JR Moores and briefly in Harry Sword’s Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion (White Rabbit, £20), though, in both cases Black Sabbath are a more obvious touchstone.

Your attitude towards the Sabs may possibly condition your reaction to both books, but in each case, there is much fun to be had in following their authors to some of the wilder sonic corners. Writing about British band Hey Colossus, Moores suggests their early material “sounded like Mad Max trying to grunt his way out of a giant bowl of Rice Krispies.” Don’t tell me you’re not going to go straight onto Google to check.

The Fall are namechecked in both books too, though fans might be better directed towards Excavate! (Faber, £25). Edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley, it’s a book that feels suitably in sync with its subject, a rackety, noisy thing; a mixture of ephemera – record covers, press releases, fanzine cuttings – and essays that extol the always contrary life and work of The Fall’s driving force Mark E Smith and also explore his interests (from football to the ghost stories of MR James). The result is a book for fans first and foremost, but one as singular as the band itself.

Does this all feel very male so far? Probably. So, time to be clear. The best music books this year were written by women. The runner-up is My Rock ’n’ Roll Friend (Canongate, £16.99), Tracey Thorn’s memoir of her friend Lindy Morrison, drummer with the cult Australian band The Go-Betweens.

The result is a warm, open-hearted book about female friendship and an angry attack on the erasure of women from the story of pop (Morrison, Thorn fears, was in danger of being written out of the story). The indignation in the last chapters is thrilling. The book is also a corrective to the idea that only alpha males have issues with women. Recommended.

But the outstanding book of the year is Last Chance Texaco (Grove Press, £20). An account of the early life and musical career of Rickie Lee Jones as told by the woman herself. It takes in a restless childhood, hippy travels, relationships with Tom Waits and heroin. It’s raw and rich. Rewarding too.

At times it feels almost novelistic in its detail. Born to restless, unhappy parents, her childhood is pure dirty realism. It could easily be a Richard Ford or an Ann Beattie short story. Then at 14 she runs away, at which point you genuinely fear she’s going to turn into a case for Philip Marlowe.

Her experiences in the hippy counterculture (at one point she ends up living in a cave) are fascinating and scarifying, before she finds her feet and finds her way into music. At which point a whole box of new problems begin.

“I can tell you that fame brings no solace, no love, and no warmth,” she writes. “I can tell you also that money isolates. You may say, ‘So what?’ and ‘I’ll take it if you don’t want it.’ I do want it, fame and money and all that goes with it. It’s just that they weren’t what I thought they would be.”

Some things cut deeper than even Samurai swords.