All Yesterday's Parties

The demands of the gig mean that I've read many books about music. It's hardly a chore, since rock and roll celebrates the outlaw, the miscreant and the car crash. I like stories about Hank Williams and Johnny Rotten, Dylan and Presley. The brain has been boggled by Nashville Babylon, Hellfire and Wouldn't It Be Nice.

The fashion these days is for hulking, forensic biographies that give you every molecule of a life story, regardless of the boredom threshold. As a result, I've let many of the recent ones pass by. Still, a random visit to a charity shop recently delivered a classy little yarn, Nico: Songs They Never Play On the Radio.

The book, written by James Young has a cult reputation. It's a story of heroin addiction and dormant celebrity, a sometime member of the Velvet Underground adrift in Manchester and eastern Europe. The gigs are mean and parlous, the singer is indifferent to everything that can't fit into a syringe and the backing band (including James Young on keyboards) is rickety and half conceived.

It's a book you can read in a couple of sittings. John Cale, Alan Ginsberg and John Cooper Clark all stumble past in the opiated afterburn. The tone is deceptively sry, but afterwards there are moral questions about Germany's war children, Andy Warhol's Factory and the lonesome death of a Chelsea girl.