Would be Attaction Bruce Thomas' The Big Wheel. A good read.
I'll give a hearty recommendation to Joe Boyd's White Bicycles, Julian Cope's Head On and James Young's Nico: Songs They Never Play on the Radio.

I got some good recommendations here:
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/rock-reader039s-digest

By the way, have you seen the documentary "We Are Together"? It's about a children's choir based in an orphanage in South Africa. It's deeply moving, and required watching for a) any fan of music and b) anyone going to Africa to join the fight against AIDS. It was on Channel 4 on Saturday night, but it's on DVD and there's an accompanying CD by the children themselves.
It's 86 minutes long and you can see it here, this week only: http://tinyurl.com/66fxfg

Good luck with your adventures!

Great stuff - thank you. Just spent a few quid on Amazon on the basis of those reccommendations.

The DVD looks like a must watch too.

Peter Guralnick's Elvis book's are excellent.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Train-Memphis-Elvis-Presley/dp/0349106517/r...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Careless-Love-Unmaking-Elvis-Presley/dp/03491116...

by Jon Savage. Brilliant book about OK music, ie punk. Great thing about it, especially for those far from record shops, yopu're sure to enjoy it but not feel any great urge to investigate the music written about. Basically a great work of cultural history.

Opposite is true of Rip it Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds. OK book - reads like a selection of long magazine articles strung together - about brilliant music, post punk. The music I discovered through this book...

Seconds for Head On (and Repossessed) and White Bicycles. Also worth a try is Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns, gossipy and enterntaining.

Two masterpieces however:
Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music, is an absolutely wonderful book. As is Dylan's Chronicles. Trouble with those however, is you're going to want to buy half a dozen CDs after every chapter. And if you can't...

Julian Cope's "Head On" which is handily packaged in one book along with the second part "Repossessed". The first one starts off in the Liverpool post-punk scene that spawned The Mighty Wah, Teardrop Explodes & Echo & The Bunnymen and is one of the moct hilarious accounts of an outsider in the music biz almost becoming a teen idol pop star by mistake! The second book is really his way of reacting against stardom, generally by taking huge amounts of mind expanding drugs!

Depends where your interst lies really, being an old Punk Rocker I love the following books:

For music journalism that is more rocknroll than half the bands they write about I cannot do without Nick Kent's "The Dark Stuff" and Lester Bangs "Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung".

Eye-witness accounts of Punk Rock in the UK don't come better than Jon Savage's "England's Dreaming" and the New York scene in Legs McNeil's "Please Kill Me".

Joe Strummer "Redemption Song" by Chris Salewicz doesn't shy away from the contradictions often overlooked in books about The Clash. I also enjoyed these ones,

The Who "Before I Get Old" by Dave Marsh.

The Beach Boys "Heroes & Villains" by Steven Gaines"

Iggy Pop "Open Up and Bleed" by Paul Trynka

farcical drinking exploits, the German live music scene in the 1970s, the terrors of night life in the Welsh Valleys and the general hooliganism that surrounds a Welsh rock band, I cannot recommend highly enough the two volumes from Deke Leonard called "Maybe I Should Have Stayed In Bed" (his growing up in various early bands) and "Winos, Rhinos And Lunatics" (the history of the band Man, with whom he has served several sentences.

That's a fiver you owe me, Leonard.

...Greil Marcus' "Mystery Train" & Craig Werner's "A Change Is Going To Come".

Each of those will give you a new way of listening to music & I guarantee they will both have you scrabbling for the iPod to feed a new piece of music into their critical machine..

I'm not long back from 6 months in Malawi and took a load of books with me. You'll be through what you brought within a month, so make sure you've got books you can swap. Most places will have a wee library where you can exchange your books for other ones.

Aw the best.

except for the Costello reference

(1) Want to know why Dylan & Springsteen are the way they are? Then read Woody Guthrie A Life by Joe Klein
(2) 60s fan? What about Joe Boyd White Bicycles....
(3) Beatles Fan? Revolution in the Head...at least you can recall all the tunes too
(4) John Peel Fan? Get the Autobiog
(5) Tom Waits Fan? Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits - The Collected Interviews by Mac Montadon
(6) Musician and his politics? Bill Bragg Progressive Patriot
(7)

Not the Jools Holland one....

Bringing it all back home by Ian Clayton - it made me laugh in many places but the final chapter is just the saddest few pages I have ever read. Struck a deep resonance with me not least because we share a couple of odd likings for some pretty unusual stuff.

Have to concur with the Julian Cope recommendations and would also add the Richard Thompson biography Strange Affair but only if you like him of course. Personally found Big Wheel to be a bunch of crap and Costello was right to sarcastically refer to Bruce Thomas as the 'funniest fucker in the world'.

wow - that's quite a response. Thanks so much. That's a good start.

I'm all set once the man from Amazon arrives :O)

as well as the Nick Kent (see above) try also Shots From The Hip by Charles Shaar Murray.

I'd also recommend these memoirs for an inside view:

Stoned and 2Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldham
A Cure For Gravity by Joe Jackson
X-Ray by Ray Davies

Incidentally I thought The Big Wheel was excellent, very well written and humorous and I can't see why EC got so steamed up about it. England's Dreaming as recommended above is essential.

"One Train Later"? It got good reviews and I was thinking of getting it but I was never a big fan of The Police. Is it worth a read?

doesn't matter what you think of The Police
also
Tainted Life Marc Almond
as a critic said of Cope's biog "it will make your heart burst"

Shakes by Jimmy McDonough is a great book on Neil Young and will keep you going for ages. It's 200 pages before he even goes solo...