Escape into pop

‘How can you come into this room and ask me “What is the purpose of life?”,’ wails Massive Attack’s laconic DJ Mushroom after a typically searching interrogation by the veteran music journalist Sylvia Patterson. In this powerful, enjoyable memoir she fares better with Spike Milligan (‘I wake up every morning and think, “Thank God, another day” ’) and gleans further nuggets of wisdom from the likes of Bono, Diana Ross and David Attenborough. Patterson, primarily an interviewer rather than a critic, isn’t interested in the mechanics of music-making or the record industry but in the fundamental question of why people do what they do. In her hands, music journalism becomes a philosophical investigation, with jokes. Always jokes.

Patterson made her name at the sorely missed pop gazette Smash Hits during its 1980s heyday and still writes under the influence of its conspiratorial intimacy and playful one-liners: Morrissey’s ‘bilious haverings’, acid-house crew D Mob’s ‘yodelsome rave-up palaver’, Prince’s ‘atomic ripple of fawn and mauve’.