The most entertaining music book of the year is by Beastie Boys Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz, simply titled Book (Faber, £32). There’s an underlying sadness to its existence — the pair only wrote it because they couldn’t make another album after third member Adam Yauch died from cancer in 2012. Excerpt from Evening Standard.
Brett Anderson had time to write Coal Black Mornings (Little, Brown £16.99) given that he is thriving again as the frontman of Suede, whose eighth album hit the top 10 a few months ago.
Tina Turner, at 79, has had the time to tell her tale twice. My Love Story (Century, £20) supersedes I, Tina, from 1986. Its title may surprise some, given that her best known relationship, with Ike Turner, was no love story. A quick scan through the index is all the reminder you need: “cocaine habit”, “controlling nature”, “womanising”, “hitman to kill TT, attempts to hire”
Jimmy Page. Founder of one of the most influential and successful rock bands of all time, legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has nevertheless remained an enigma. In this definitive and comprehensive biography of his life so far, Chris Salewicz draws on his own interviews with Page and those closest around him to unravel the man behind the mystery.
Having sold over 300 million copies worldwide, Led Zeppelin was the biggest band of the ’70s and has been loved by the legions ever since. From his own conversations with Jimmy, the rest of Led Zeppelin, old girlfriends, tour managers and session musicians to name but a few, Salewicz reveals the many trials and tribulations which transformed the middle class boy from the Surrey suburbs into one of rock’s most enigmatic frontmen.
Being John Lennon: A Restless Life -What was it like to be John Lennon? What was it like to be the castoff child, the clown at school, and the middle-class suburban boy who pretended to be a working-class hero? How did it feel to have one of the most recognizable singing voices in the world, but to dislike it so much he always wanted to disguise it?
Being John Lennon is not about the whitewashed Prince of Peace of Imagine legend―because that was only a small part of him. The John Lennon depicted in these pages is a much more kaleidoscopic figure, sometimes almost a collision of different characters.
He was, of course, funny, often very funny. But above everything, he had attitude―his impudent style somehow personifying the aspirations of his generation to question authority. He could, and would, say the unsayable. Though there were more glamorous rock stars in rock history, even within the Beatles, it was John Lennon’s attitude which caught, and then defined, his era in the most memorable way.
Roger Daltrey is another upbeat storyteller in Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite (Blink, £20), whose title raises two fingers to the headteacher who expelled him at 15 and told him, “You’ll never make anything of your life.”
Next to the tortured, destructive guitarist and wild man Keith Moon, he’s the sensible one. When he’s briefly kicked out of the band in 1965 it’s not for unprofessional behaviour but for flushing the others’ drugs down the toilet. But the passages from the band’s recent years, now that just him and Townshend remain, show that he’s a loyal, likeable man. 
Philip Norman taking on Eric Clapton in Slowhand (Orion, £25)
