The best rock memoir by some distance of 2014 wasn’t written by a big name such as John Lydon or Bernard Sumner but by Viv Albertine, former guitarist of cult all-female punk band the Slits. You needn’t be a Slits fan to find Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys (Faber) moving and compelling. Punk fans will enjoy her vivid insights into the scene’s key players, but themes established early on – creativity, belonging, the casual cruelty of men – recur with a vengeance in the book’s bleaker, post-Slits second half. Albertine’s fearless, discomfiting honesty makes this book as radical and valuable an artistic contribution as the music she made.
Even Albertine doesn’t demythologise rock’n’roll as thoroughly as her post-punk contemporary Steve Hanley’s view from the trenches, The Big Midweek: Life Inside the Fall (Route). With co-writer Olivia Piekarski, Hanley entertainingly relates 19 years of humiliations, disappointments and fleeting pleasures in the precarious employ of the cult Manchester band’s cantankerous Fuhrer Mark E Smith. It might not put you off joining a band all together, but it will definitely deter you from joining one led by Smith.
The Fall singer, a keen fan of Cologne’s Can, might prefer to read David Stubbs’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (Faber). Glibly christened by the British music press, krautrock was less a genre or a scene than a mood that gripped German music in the 1970s. Stubbs champions the dreamers, cranks and malcontents who wanted a clean break from both Anglo-American rock and Germany’s poisonous past. Kraftwerk aside, they struggled for attention at the time but remain an evergreen influence because of their determination to create something new.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, many gifted outsiders were hatching parallel revolutions. Will Hermes’s reissued Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (Viking) is a brisk, panoramic study of mid-70s Gotham which juggles the timelines of innovators such as Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash, Philip Glass and Talking Heads. Critics of gentrification will note that New York was a violent, decaying basket-case of a city (“even a walk in the park was no walk in the park”), where cheap rents and a craving for escapism helped to foster a remarkable creative boom. Hermes, a Rolling Stone writer, was a teenager at the time and subtly inserts his own memories.
Two authorised biographies succeed by echoing and amplifying their subjects’ voices. In Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (Canongate), Rick Bragg’s brawny, inflamed prose captures the flavour of a sulphurous rock’n’roll pioneer whose heyday was brief and scandalous, and the drama of an era when pop music was deemed a threat to America’s morals. Marcus O’Dair’s Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt (Serpent’s Tail) is almost as charming and inquisitive as Wyatt himself. So unusual is the 50-year career of this self-deprecating genius that the cameos include Jimi Hendrix, Warren Beatty, Georges Braque and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Don’t take the title of Greil Marcus’s The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (Yale University Press) too literally. His typically idiosyncratic selection (dedicated “to everyone I left out”) distils a lifetime of thinking about music as “a web of affinities”, presenting classic songs as bottomless wonders unbound by time, place or personality. DH Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller, trust the tale” is his critic’s credo and he pursues it down several exhilarating, occasionally maddening paths.
While Marcus insists that pop music is sublime, Mark Ellen’s Rock Stars Stole My Life: A Big Bad Love Affair With Music (Coronet) reminds us that it can also be joyously ridiculous. The raised eyebrow to Marcus’s furrowed brow, Ellen relates a blessed life – public‑school prog-rock fan, Tony Blair’s university bandmate, Live Aid presenter, influential magazine editor – with playful wit and indefatigable good humour. Having somewhat missed the point of fandom as an earnest adolescent, he now subscribes to the approach he first espoused at Smash Hits: “a fond, full-colour mission to squeeze the maximum amount of fun out of everything”.
Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (Bloomsbury), Carl Wilson’s acclaimed contribution to Continuum’s long-running 33 1/3 series of books about classic albums, first appeared in 2007 but it reemerges with a new afterword and short essays by fans such as James Franco and Nick Hornby. Wilson uses his loathing of a Celine Dion album to spark a wide-ranging, eye-opening exploration of the politics of taste that might change the way you listen.
Finally, Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (Granta) tells one of rock’s grimmest tales: how three courageous Russian activists’ “complicated punk adventure” led to jail. Gessen, author of a damning biography of Putin, shapes deep research, court transcripts, prison letters and exclusive interviews into a gripping narrative. The days leading up to the arrest have the pace and intimacy of a thriller; the cruel, absurd trial is Kafkaesque. “A great work of art is always a miracle,” Gessen declares. Great music writing, in its myriad forms, unpacks those miracles.
• Save at least 20% off RRP on all these titles from the Guardian Bookshop. Visit bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over £10. A £1.99 charge applies to telephone orders.
