THE LOGICAL successor to 2005’s Guitar Man, in which Will Hodgkinson corralled some of the instrument’s better-known practitioners to show him how to play it at the not-so-tender age of 34, Song Man (Bloomsbury, £12.99/of-fer £11.69), describes how the likes of Ray Davies, Hal David and Arthur Lee help him to pen a three-chord classic.

Hodgkinson plays his half-formed Mystery Fox for Andy Partridge of XTC and is told he is “like a chimp with a pencil”. His singing voice makes his wife cry. It’s very funny.

But he might have learnt a thing or two from Philip Lambert’s Inside The Music Of Brian Wilson (Continuum, £14.99/£14.25). Rather than contemplate Wilson’s adult-child mentality or be rude about Mike Love again, Lambert focuses on the essence of the Beach Boys’ music, explaining just what makes their songs so timeless. He is ultra-detailed but enthusiastic, and you will be gagging to hear the obscurities that he describes so fully – My Buddy Seat “captures the energy and wildness of a joyride in the hills” – so best take this only if you have access to iTunes.

The same goes for Simon Reynolds’s Bring the Noise (Faber, £16.99/£16.15), a cracking compendium of the former Melody Maker writer’s work. He is not too embarrassed to include a review of a Raze single that sniffily dismissed House as “something of a lame duck” in 1988. This is brave as, furrowed Morrissey and Radiohead pieces aside, most of the book investigates the sounds that have shrieked out of pirate radio since the start of the Nineties (speed garage, techstep, gabba, jump-up, crunk), a jungle of sub-genres usually alien to mainstream critical respect. This makes Bring the Noise an important book, but you really need a companion CD.

With a title to make you fidget for the boy, Alex James’s Bit of a Blur (Little, Brown, £16.99/£16.15) is quite charming, a little smug, and not as good as it thinks it is – rather like his band at the height of their fame. The Blur versus Oasis battle and the years of alcoholic bad boy behaviour are related with the air of a Totnes retiree. Still, insights into the Blur hierarchy are most intriguing: walking across a field of rattlesnakes in the US, Damon Albarn snaps “don’t be a poof!” at the sensitive James. “The screaming never stopped,” he says of the band’s hit-making years. “It’s really bad for your ears.”

But my pick of the bunch is a reprint of Hellfire (Penguin, £8.99/£8.55) Nick Tosches’s florid and poetic biography of Jerry Lee Lewis. Frequently it feels as if Tosches is veering into fiction, but the myths, maps and legends of Southern rock’n’roll have never been told in such a germane way.

He is prone to almost laughable exaggeration: Tosches reckons that after recording Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On, Jerry Lee had “in this little song . . . found his dirt, dirt upon which would rise a tale wilder and darker, bigger and badder, than any lived, told, or even dreamed by those who came before”.

Strange, then, that Lewis – the child-marrying, gun-toting wildman – met his Waterloo in a Tooting ballroom. Not that, lying on your beach blanket, you’ll want to be reminded of the Northern Line.

Buy the books here

Celebrity Choice: Tim Wheeler, Ash frontman

THE DARK STUFF is a selection of the best features by Nick Kent, a great music writer with an obvious leaning towards rock’n’roll’s more wayward geniuses like Jerry Lee Lewis, Shane McGowan, Iggy, Keef and Brian Wilson. The book is arranged in nice, bite-sized chapters so that you can flick through the sordid stories that form a strong argument for the connection between genius and insanity. It also contains my favourite rock quote, in which the deranged Texan Roky Erickson explains to Kent that the Devil came to him and said: “Roky, you are mah human.”

Ash’s new album Twilight of the Innocents is out now

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