Frank Zappa dismissed writing about music as being about as useful as "fishing about architecture", but then, he never got the chance to read any of these. Tony Clayton-Leadips into some current books for music lovers

WHITE BICYCLES

Joe Boyd Serpents Tail, £8.99 pbk, 282pp

Some people have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Call it destiny, call it catching the zeitgeist by the tail, but these people get to know the movers, shakers, scenesters and chancers. American record producer Joe Boyd was one of them; he arrived in London from Boston in the mid-1960s and immediately fell into the hippest music scene in the world, producing albums by the likes of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention and getting all chummy with anyone and everyone that mattered at the time.

This memoir is full of choice anecdotes, written with the breezy confidence of someone who has befriended the successful and the famous. It isn't for those who like to read scurrilous gossip, but if you fancy a gentle traipse through the back pages of the 1960s then it's a bona fide winner.

Boyd on coke: "I never knew cocaine to improve anything. When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse."

TOUCHING FROM A DISTANCE

Deborah Curtis Faber & Faber, £8.99 pbk, 212pp

If you haven't seen Control, the recent biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, then this is the best place to start (the movie was based on it). Written by Curtis's widow, it's a first-hand account of an ordinary Manchester lad's transformation from Bowie fan to post-punk icon.

The book could have been something of a hagiography, but Deborah's northern honesty thankfully saves it from that fate. Funny, tragic (inevitably) and all too believable of one man's apparently insurmountable failings.

Curtis on Curtis: "He turned around, brought two long hands up and put them around my neck, just tight enough to render me immobile. After a few moments, he released me and we went to bed . . . the incident was never mentioned again."

BOWIE, BOLAN AND THE BROOKLYN BOY - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Tony Visconti Harper Collins, £8.99 pbk, 394pp

Now here's a guy who's been around houses and every room in them. Now in his mid-60s, Tony Visconti departed his beloved New York for London just in time to see glam rock being born, teaming up with Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Sparks, each of whom learned that Visconti's studio skills were immensely beneficial.

Visconti skips through the years and the acts he worked with (including Thin Lizzy, Boomtown Rats, U2, Manic Street Preachers and Morrissey) in fairly breathless, strictly chronological prose. Yet if the book is weighed down by relentless facts, it's enlivened by anecdote.

Visconti on meetings: "I can't stand to sit in A&R meetings and be told that the group I'm about to work with has to sound 40 per cent Incubus, 40 per cent Coldpay and 20 per cent Keane. It makes me want to commit murder, or jump out of a window."

REDEMPTION SONG - THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF JOE STRUMMER

Chris Salewicz Harper Collins, £10.99 pbk, 660pp

Make no bones about it, this is most assuredly the definitive biography of the one-time Clash leader and socialist punk rocker. Over the course of three years and 300 interviews (including exclusive access to Strummer's family, close friends and musical allies) veteran music biographer/writer Salewicz unearths pretty much everything you need to know about the career diplomat's son whose grit and sensitivity played a large part in defining The Clash as the best rock band of the punk era.

Salewicz on mosh pits: "Joe's mike-stand slipped into the pit. Then Joe was down in the pit himself . . . No one quite saw what happened, but Joe was down on the ground. He was dragged back behind a large wire shield; on his feet, surrounded by security heavies, like some very aggro gallant young squire in a medieval battle scene."

COLTRANE: THE STORY OF A SOUND

Ben Ratliff Faber & Faber, £16.99 hdbk, 250pp

More a decontruction of John Coltrane's music than an actual biography, New York Times jazz critic Ratliff nonetheless digs deep in his critical appraisal of the jazz giant and the man accused by poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin as being "an ugly noisemaker".

Unfortunately, the appraisal runs closer to pretentious than anything else: "There is a mystic's keen sensitivity for the sublime," writes Ratliff, "which runs like a secret river under American culture - the meditative and semi-erotic aesthetic of endurance . . . " And so on.

Ratcliff on detox: "Coltrane detoxed the cowboy way, shutting himself up at home and going cold turkey."

THERE'S A RIOT GOING ON

Peter Doggett Canongate, £25 hdbk, 598pp

Between 1965 and 1972, rock and soul music were a major force for change, politically and socially, and the fusing of anthems, imagery, lyrics and personalities is what writer Peter Doggett gets to the core of. It's a weighty tome, but Doggett uncovers nuggets of information as he chronicles the collision of musical commitment with radical fervour.

Touching upon pretty much every facet of the "revolution" (from the Yippies to the Black Panthers, from anarchists to the Gay Liberation Front), the book successfully reaches beyond the obvious to inform, engage and educate.

Doggett on hypocrisy: "Rock critic Ellen Willis, a member of the New York feminist collective Redstockings, noted dolefully: 'All around me I see men who consider themselves revolutionaries, yet exploit their wives and girlfriends shamelessly without ever noting a contradiction.' " (page 279)

SLASH

Slash with Anthony Bozza Harper Collins, £18.99, hdbk, 458pp

It's all sex, drugs and rock'n'roll here, as the former Guns N' Roses guitarist dishes the dirt on his lifestyle, his former band mates (including, of course, Axl Rose), his celeb chums (Puff Daddy, Lemmy, Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper) and the music industry. Truth be told, it's about as raucous as a birthday party in a creche; ghostwriter Bozza (whose rock'n'roll writing credentials are intact via previous books on Eminem and Tommy Lee) does the best he can with Slash yacking about this and that, but overall it's just one juvenile episode after another.

Slash on hangers-on: "We were like a vacuum that sucked people up and spit them out; a ton of people around us fell by the wayside . . . Some people died, not because of anything we did to them, but as a side effect of being too close to the flame. People would get attracted to our fucked-up weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide."

RE-MAKE/RE-MODEL

Michael Bracewell Faber & Faber, £20 hdbk, 426pp

Subtitled Art, Pop, Fashion and the making of Roxy Music, 1953-1972, this is more social history than bog-standard rock band biog. Bracewell likes to wrap his themes and theories in skeins of delicately woven sentences and paragraphs, making this perhaps the archetypal Roxy Music story for the archetypal Roxy Music fan (ie when Brian Eno was still a fully fledged, flamboyant member). The subtitle, in fact, says it all, while Bracewell says more of it even better.

The book includes many insightful first-hand interviews with the main protagonists and most if not all of their associates and contemporaries (Anthony Price, Simon Puxley, Janet Street-Porter, Nick de Ville).

Andy McKay on Roxy Music: "If Roxy Music had been like cooking, it would be the dish in Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook called, I think, 'Car Crash' . . . 'a hemisphere of puréed dates and a hemisphere of puréed anchovies, which are then stuck together in a ball and served in a pool of raspberry juice."

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC

Daniel Levitin Atlantic Books, £17.99 hdbk, 322pp

Music, it would be fair to say, is an obsession at the heart of human nature, quite likely even more fundamental to humanity than language. Daniel Levitin is a former session musician, sound engineer and record producer who is also, as it happens, a neuroscientist who runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at Montreal's McGill University. He ably demonstrates in his layperson's guide to the neuroscience of music that our musical likes and dislikes begin to form before we are born. He also exhaustively explains why music can offer such profound emotional experiences.

An interesting book that stimulates, bores and illuminates in equal measure.

Levitin on the brain: "From a one-dimensional continuum of molecules vibrating at different speeds, our brains construct a rich, multidimensional pitch space with three, four, or even five dimensions."