The Sunday Times music book of the year

John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman
HarperCollins £25
Written with the co-operation of Yoko Ono, who subsequently disowned it for being ‘disrespectful', Norman's life of Lennon is the most complete account yet of an incendiary talent and troubled soul. Fame has seldom alighted on a man who was, from first to last, such an unhappy misfit. From the upheavals of his early life, as an unwanted child raised by his strict and starchy aunt Mimi, to his last days as a homesick, housebound exile in New York, Lennon never really settled. Not even leading the most famous pop group in history could bring the peace he hymned in his celebrated song Imagine. The reasons why are superbly marshalled in this meticulously researched, compulsively readable book.

ROCK ON by DAN KENNEDY
Harvill Secker £12.99
A rock'n'roll version of The Office, this account of Kennedy's spell as an employee of the Warner label in New York is a droll antidote to the standard musicbiz memoir. When he arrives in 2002, the budgets for debauchery have been slashed, and nervous marketing types rule. Desperate avarice is everybody's default position - from the new proprietors who loot the company for their $20m bonuses to the artists eager to flog their integrity to the first corporate sponsor. Kennedy views this shambles with the eye of a larky obituarist.

WHEN GIANTS WALKED THE EARTH: A Biography of Led Zeppelin by MICK WALL
Orion £20
Led Zeppelin summed up the best and the worst of rock culture in the 1970s, and Wall is one of few biographers to have got the measure of both sides of the band. If he is steadfastly nonjudgmental in the face of all the drinking and drugging, the misogynist abuse of groupies and the psychotic thuggishness of drummer John Bonham and manager Peter Grant, that's because he appreciates how their callous disregard for normal constraints also allowed Led Zeppelin to make toweringly original music - for a while. Theirs was a Faustian tale that veteran metal-journo Wall tells with authority.

ON SOME FARAWAY BEACH:The Life and Times of Brian Eno by DAVID SHEPPARD
Orion £20
Encapsulating the life of a prolific character such as Eno is, as Sheppard points out, “like folding down a skyscraper into a suitcase”. His preference is for the younger man, the art-school maverick turned boa-wearing synthesizer whiz who lit up the early 1970s with Roxy Music and went on to produce U2. Although Sheppard skimps the last 25 years and doesn't delve far into Eno's art projects or complicated marriage, he is strong on the bitter 1970s battle with Bryan Ferry and the working friendship with Bowie. He sheds interesting light, too, on Eno's fondness for women with large bottoms.

GIG: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist by SIMON ARMITAGE
Viking £16.99Armitage is a writer and poet for whom the template of performance is supplied by the rock gig. In this lively memoir he takes us through his youthful obsession with punk and the “new romantics”, right up to his current interest in Arctic Monkeys and their “engaging narratives and subtle half-rhymes (sung) in a republic of south Yorkshire accent”. Armitage's taste in music (indie guitar bands such as the Smiths and the Fall) is stuck firmly north of Watford, and the way he weaves it into the story of his life with his wife, formerly the singer with Sue and the Speedy Bears, makes this a must-read for fortysomething teenagers everywhere.

A FREEWHEELIN' TIME by SUZE ROTOLO
Aurum £16.99
Rotolo was Bob Dylan's first proper girlfriend, and was with him, on and off, for four formative years in New York from 1961 to 1965. Apart from hugging his arm on the front cover of his second album, Rotolo kept a low profile before publishing a book that has curried her no favour with Dylan anoraks. Her portrait of an unsophisticated and unscrupulous young hick from Minnesota may not burnish the myth, but she tells it with a keen eye for Manhattan's bohemian folky ethos and, given Dylan's relentless womanising, a complete lack of vengeful bitterness.

THE REST IS NOISE:Listening to the 20th Century by ALEX ROSS
Fourth Estate £25
Much modern classical composition is a no-go area for many music lovers, and a pointless racket to the general public - hardly a promising subject therefore for a non-academic book. The New Yorker's music critic Ross, however, has turned it into a gripping account of the last century in which troubled, shady characters such as Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovitch seek refuge in the patronage of Hitler and Stalin, and outlandish avant-garde ideas find shelter in the work of cool jazzers such as Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. A definitive work of reference dressed as unputdown-able social history.

THE OLIVETTI CHRONICLES by JOHN PEEL
Bantam Press £20
Although he never got feted as a journalist the way he did as a DJ and broadcaster, Peel contributed columns and reviews to a number of publications throughout his career. This selection of his articles (chosen by his children and named after the make of typewriter he always used) reminds you of his wonderfully surreal humour; as in “Aerosmith thundered away with all the careless spontaneity of a telephone booth.” It also contains some surprisingly indiscreet, possibly fictitious personal details, such as “somebody called Anne has written to me from Preston offering to fellate me till I faint...”.

THE FALLEN: Searching for the Missing Members of The Fall by DAVE SIMPSON
Canongate £18.99
MarkESmith, the prime mover of the Fall, the longest-running punk group on the planet, is a notoriously autocratic band-leader who has fired around 40 backing musicians during his 30-year career. Simpson's idea - to interview as many of these discarded sidemen (and women) as he can track down - is a good one, given that Smith himself is as enigmatic in interviews as he is on record. The results of Simpson's picaresque endeavours are a hoot and reveal a surprising amount of goodwill for a capricious and sometimes violent employer. Most believable is the lady vocalist who observes, “Mark's the sort of person who likes pulling wings off flies.”

THE CLASH by STRUMMER, JONES, SIMONON, HEADON
Atlantic £30
The trend for bands to publish books the size of paving slabs with lots of previously unpublished posters and accompanying “in their own words” blah has gone beyond the point of dullness. The Clash bucks it, thanks partly to the fact that the band's career was so hectic and short - a little over eight years - and mainly to the individual members' refreshing candour. Headon apologises for his heroin addiction; Jones forgives Strummer for kicking him out of the band; and Simonon says he wishes that the triple album Sandinista! had been released as a single one.

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