BILL DRUMMOND 45 (Little Brown)
In a former life Bill Drummond was half of The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, a.k.a. The KLF, a.k.a. The One World Orchestra, a.k.a. 2K, art terrorists and variously Britain's greatest rap and rave acts. "45" - bound within covers of exactly the same dimension as a 7" single sleeve, naturally - is a loose collection of essays that probably would baulk at calling itself a memoir or autobiography, but nevertheless achieves that function in a roundabout fashion.
Presented in non-chronological order, here are tales from Drummond's time as manager of Echo And The Bunnymen, fractured observations on the wayward genius of The Teardrop Explodes, the art behind making a good soup, the secret fascination of department stores, meeting Peter Green, public transport in Calcutta, London and Helsinki, the small matter of the burning of a million quid and countless other vignettes from the life and imagination of one of our finest renaissance former pop stars.
Whether you'd find the book as entertaining if you weren't a long-time KLF obsessive is open to debate, but throughout Drummond's prose loops and reels in an engaging, conversational fashion, as enthusiastic and eminently readable when he's describing his love of Ordnance Survey maps as when he's banging about how much better he thinks The Chemical Brothers are than The KLF ever were. The far out ramblings of a middle-aged man hunched over his notebook in Aylesbury library they may be, but it's a fun and gently informative trip nevertheless.