fascinating read...disarmingly honest

Absolutely fantastic, honest and candid

Coogan's childhood vignettes are both touching and hilarious...Coogan covers his one-time appetite for cocaine and alcohol with as much frankness as he does everything else but such is the warmth of the book, his excesses are the least interesting part of this very funny man...A-ha, indeed

a wonderful insight into a man who has lived it all

Written with distinctive humour and an unexpected candour, Coogan's autobiography travels from a noisy childhood surrounded by foster kids via his attention-seeking teenage years to his emergence as a household name with the birth of Alan Partridge.

With trademark humour Steve Coogan shares all

A simple, readable confessional … interspersed with Coogan’s trademark caustic asides and loads of telly and performance insight… If you love Coogan, this delivers

Self-aware, deferential and modest

Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song...A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band I’ve ever seen

Britain’s great lost punk band

So colourful, so comical, so damn bitchy... hilarious

Matheson writes with the jagged verve he once sought from his band.

Biographical subject and author have found their perfect match.

One Man Band rumbles along… Welles in his middle years is a more engaging prospect than most artists at a similar point. He has been lucky to have Callow as a biographer, balancing warmth with skepticism, fondness with reproof.

This richly detailed and revelatory biography presents the most frank and intimate portrait yet of Ray Davies

Rogan does an excellent job of trying to work out what makes The Kinks’ enigmatic frontman tick whilst charting the tumultuous career of a band whose idiosyncratic but brilliant hits are currently enjoying a renaissance

This book is a good, solid, factually based read throughout… I imagine nearing six decades of recording history to be squeezed into one book is a task beyond the scope of a lot of authors, but this has been done rather well by Johnny Rogan… Excellent and complex.

An engaging and very accessible history book about our modern artistic achievements that, provocatively, also debunks some of the very icons it praises.