On his 18th birthday, the poet Simon Armitage received a congratulatory letter from his MP, as was the custom in the West Yorkshire constituency in which he grew up. Flourishing the missive, he walked into his local, presented it to the pub's stickler of a landlord, and ordered a pint of beer. “Without even speaking,” Armitage writes, “[he] served me with a glass of Coke and a bag of crisps, then returned to his conversation.” Twenty-five years on, Armitage is presumably no longer having problems in pubs, but his ability to attract absurd, balloon-pricking anecdotes remains undiminished. This does not, in itself, set him apart.

What does is his eye and ear for the riches contained within such episodes. If, as he speculates, Armitage has inherited from his probation-officer father - an energetic member of the local amateur-dramatics group and a part-time barber-shop singer, to boot - an ease with and need for an audience, he is still learning from his dad when it comes to comic timing and the lugubrious one-liner. At a London poetry reading, packed with family and friends, the poet begins, “There's a word in this poem I've never said in front of my mother before.” After the briefest of heartbeats, a voice from the back says: “Is it thank you?” And, when Armitage finally gets round (in his forties) to forming a band, he and his mate Craig arrive at a shortlist of 105 possible names, to which his father responds: “How about Midlife Crisis?”

Not that Armitage fils is any slouch in the pithy-quip department, or in his understanding that even the sparest of verbal constructions require both precision and hard labour. The rhythm, propulsion and texture he responds to so instinctively in the bands he has followed since his teens are present in his writing, too. There are times here where his default position of deadpan drollery seems to prevent him from acknowledging what to the reader is crystal clear: that Armitage's poetry, even without music,is the equal of his favourite songwriters in its ability to “sing”. He liberates words from the printed page and up, away, into a place that is, though lacking notes on a stave, profoundly musical.

As framing devices go, the one that notionally corrals this memoir - that his “gigs” as a touring, performing poet are sloppy seconds to his first dreams of pop stardom, and that his development can be faintly traced by the key rock concerts he has attended over the years - seems neither opportunistic nor arch; perhaps because Armitage is too much of a rambler to be fenced in. Chapters might be given titles such as The Blue Nile, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 21 May 2006, but they serve more as springboards for deep dives into the poet's memory banks, from which he often emerges with exhibits quite unrelated to the gig in question (as when, yanked back in time to a canal holiday he took as a teen, Armitage recalls retrieving a carrier bag from the water, “the dense and colourful-looking contents turn[ing] out to be the sodden fur of several drowned kittens”).

Sometimes, though, the concert reclaims his attention, as when he watches Morrissey, “with his carved head and crestfallen quiff”, in Blackburn in 2006 and experiences a “moment”, of a type any ardent music fan of a certain vintage will recognise. “For as long as it lasts,” he writes, “I'm tied by the arms to two horses which gallop away in opposite directions, one towards a past I can never have again, and one towards the unavoidable misery of old age.”

The Blackburn chapter is preceded by Armitage's lyrics to the song Melek's Lullaby, one of a number he wrote, for a Channel 4 film, that were inspired by the stories told to him by the female inmates of Downview prison. Like so many before him, Armitage implies that he cannot resolve the old poems-lyrics conundrum (Keats? Dylan? Surely the question should be: who cares?). Except, of course, as Melek's Lullaby demonstrates - its repetitions, black humour and compassion communicating as much heartache as any song by one of Armitage's idols, while singing on the page as a poem - he does.

I read this book in one sitting. It moved me to tears, to shouts of laughter, and made me look at even the most mundane things in a different way. And it propelled me to the CD shelf, so I could listen, at full blast, to the Blue Nile, the Fall and the Smiths. You might, upon finishing Gig, hesitate to go as far as the Japanese couple, who write to tell Armitage that “they like my work so much they'd like to come and spend their honeymoon with me in my house”. But he is someone you would share a pint with in an instant (there would be so much to discuss: not least his laudable dislike of jazz; or the fact that he came, late and with difficulty, to Bob Dylan). The encounter would preferably take place in a pub with a lock-in; possibly with his dad along as well, to deflate the tyres; and definitely with something a touch stronger in the glasses than Coke.

GIG: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist by Simon Armitage Viking £16.99 pp304

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