The best music books of 2013

From Morrissey's Autobiography to the tale of Paul McCartney's strange decade, Dorian Lynskey finds books to satisfy even the most ravenous hunger for pop

Dorian Lynskey - The Guardian, Wednesday 4 December 2013

Yay yay for the Monkees … they matter more than the Doors in Bob Stanley’s heroic Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

In a lean year for music memoirs, Morrissey's Autobiography (Penguin Classics) hoovered up attention. Not all of it was positive but no fan should be disappointed by a book so perfectly representative of the man himself. He can be vengeful, pompous and breathtakingly vicious, yet also lyrical, generous, surprisingly self-aware and consistently hilarious. The key to Morrissey's embattled psyche lies in several inspiring passages about his favourite records. Presenting "the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived", pop music was the torch that guided him through his gloomy youth, and you sense that he has never forgiven the world for failing to live up to such glorious promises.

Morrissey also pops up in Bedsit Disco Queen (Virago) by former Everything But the Girl singer Tracey Thorn, a much warmer take on the period when oppositional post-punk values tangled with the top 20. Uncommonly likable and astute, Thorn conveys what it's like to be a normal person in an abnormal line of work.

Is there anything more to be said about the Beatles? Yes, apparently, if you're renowned Fabologist Mark Lewisohn, who knows more about the band than I do about my own children. Provided you're thrilled rather than terrified by the prospect of a book so microscopically detailed that it fills 840 pages without reaching 1963, All These Years: Volume One: Tune In (Little, Brown) is unbeatable, drawing on every imaginable source to make rock's most overfamiliar origin myth feel surprising and even suspenseful.
More