The 10 best… music memoirs

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

(Simon & Schuster, 2004) What becomes an enigma best? Answer: appearing to shed light on a mythical career, while only slightly lifting the veil on his inner life. On his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan transmits his knowledge and passion about American music with straight-talking eloquence. Chronicles transposes that ease to paper, making this ruminative semi-autobiography the tome by which others will be judged. But if you want to know about "Judas" going electric, or the supporting cast of wives, lovers and offspring, look elsewhere.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Simon Napier-Bell

(Ebury Press, 1982) Music managers range from notorious hard-men with an eye on the bottom line (Led Zeppelin's Peter Grant springs to mind) to quixotic gadflys whose mercurial minds are always looking for the next happening. Napier-Bell is firmly in the latter camp, having looked after the likes of T Rex and Wham! His first book focuses on the 60s, when the pop world was young, but not innocent: brothel scenes with Keith Moon are just one of the many juicy indiscretions in this witty memoir.

Head-On/Repossessed by Julian Cope

Faithfull by Marianne Faithfull and David Dalton

Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus

(Canongate, 1971) The spectre of an unreliable narrator flits around this book, which was famously edited down from the multiple thousands of words Mingus submitted to publishers. Starting with the jazz bassist and composer's childhood in Watts – the scene of riots in 1965 – Beneath The Underdog (subtitled, His World as Composed by Mingus) is less a polite chronicle than a kaleidoscopic screed taking in sexual economics, the complexities of racism, graphic bedroom scenes and not nearly quite as much jazz as the genre disciples would have liked.

Mötley Crüe: The Dirt by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil, with contributions from Neil Strauss

(Harper Collins, 2002) Mötley Crüe were the kind of band that thought This Is Spinal Tap was a real documentary and that Hammer Of The Gods – Led Zeppelin's scurrilous, legendary biography – a thrown gauntlet. The debauchery of their 80s tenure is probably unparalleled, and their tale both tragic and hilarious. But perhaps the most insidious revelations concern the human beings behind the cartoon rock pigs: elder statesman Mick Mars's crippling disease and Tommy Lee's razor-sharp wit.

Kraftwerk: I Was A Robot by Wolfgang Flür

(Sanctuary, 2003) The "electronic Beatles" operate an infamously closed shop. After a band schism, drummer Wolfgang Flür broke ranks with core Man Machine duo Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, who seemed, at that time, to be far more into cycling than music. They then tried to block publication. All of this bad blood lends I Was A Robot an embittered tang. But through Flür – who had a cold, distant father, then two cold and distant bosses in Schneider and Hütter — we discover the fallible creatures of flesh and bone lurking behind Kraftwerk's chrome exterior.

Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star by Ian Hunter

45 by Bill Drummond

I Need More by Iggy Pop

(2.13.61 Publications, 1997) Forget the gruesome insurance ads, and feel Iggy stab himself with a pencil. The Stooges are probably still a marginal band in rock's pantheon but they invented punk rock a full decade before time, and their lead singer has endured a trailer-park childhood, institutionalisation, self-mutilation, draft-dodging, a musical partnership with Bowie and quantities of drugs that have banjaxed lesser hangers-on, emerging as more ruminative than damaged. A biopic is still struggling to get off the ground but Pop's life is one lived with eyes agog.