For Jools Holland, autobiography is a rigorously selective business. The past 17 years, during which wealth, fame and domestic contentment have featured heavily in his life, scarcely impinge on this book. Disappointment awaits anybody who picks it up hoping to read about his recent OBE or his appointment as Deputy Lieutenant of Kent. There’s barely a whisper here about his palatial London home round the corner from Buckingham Palace, nor does he mention that he and his second wife Christabel, the former Lady Durham, are friends of the Windsors.

Even his career successes of the 1990s, as the piano-playing leader of the Rhythm & Blues Orchestra and host of BBC2’s music show Later with Jools Holland, get only the briefest mentions in a story that pretty much ends in 1992. In a way, this is understandable. But Holland’s desire to refocus attention on his roguish past and soft-pedal his current status as a respected musician and popular media performer – the country-church-loving patron saint of middle-aged, middle-England rock’n’roll orthodoxy – ought to make for a more interesting read. Heaven knows he has enough tales to tell.

Twenty years ago, Holland’s life was a sequence of amazing scrapes. He somehow survived a head-on collision in the fast lane of the M5, escaping with only minor injuries. He became a national nuisance when he used the f-word in a trail for his yoof music show The Tube, broadcast live in the early evening. He dumped his first wife around the time of the birth of their second child so he could date Lord Lambton’s daughter-in-law. As if that wasn’t enough, a year later thousands of pounds of Christabel Durham’s jewellery disappeared from Holland’s office – stolen, it turned out, by his father, who was sentenced to 15 months in jail.

You could hardly make this up, and a less reticent narrator might have turned it into a ripping yarn. But that is not Holland’s style. He loves his insouciant quips, and has many anecdotes involving the invariably colourful characters he has met along the way – such as Reggie Kray, Paula Yates and the late, disgraced Lord Lambton. But whenever questions arise as to what’s going on behind the cheeky-chappie shtick, the shutters go up.

On the subject of his father’s burglary, he adopts the stiffest of upper lips: “We were not angry, just disappointed. My father had clearly been in a precarious state of mind.” The presumably traumatic break up of his marriage gets even shorter shrift: “Mary has always behaved with complete dignity, which is more than can be said for me.” The surprise revelation that Christabel is now godmother to one of her husband’s ex’s children by a second marriage is signed off with a crisp: “Let’s return to my music and my career.”

To a degree, Holland’s brisk refusal to adopt the fashionable touchy-feely approach to self-disclosure is refreshing. But after 350 pages, the reader is bound to feel slightly short-changed on insights into the talented Mr Holland – not to mention his remarkable, bad old dad.

BAREFACED LIES & BOOGIE-WOOGIE BOASTS by Jools Holland
M Joseph £18.99 pp354

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