Eric Goulden - A Dysfunctional Success (Do Not Press).
Picked this up in London last weekend, began reading it on the flight home and finished it within 24 hours. Yep, Wreckless Eric's auto-bio is a fine read; fast, funny and (at times) frightening. Just the fact that there is little to no self-pitying here makes a nice change from most other rock-bios. From his childhood days on Eric is able to create a picture of himself as someone who almost accidentally stumbled into success and found out he was completely unable to deal with it. Luckily for us he was still able to come up with a batch of amazin' tunes over the years that (at least) still get their just RPM's here at HQ on a regular basis. My only beef is that the book ends somewhere in the mid 80s, robbing us of almost two decades of the complete story. At that point Eric managed to battle his alcoholism and became a father, which is all fine 'n dandy, but certainly didn't finish his musical genius. Anybody familiar with the stellar 'Joe Meek' 45 he did for Sympathy will attest to this. But hey, maybe he saved some for a second book, which, on the strength of this one, I'd pay for in advance!.