Named after a New York Dolls song, Barney Hoskyns’ 1995 novel is a rather short but hardly sweet reflection on a period when British rock journalism appeared to have its finger on the cultural pulse, capable of moving quite freely from rock’n’roll reviews to references that embraced the literary, the artistic and the political. In the early 1980s, when post-punk was transmogrifying into the flashier postures of New Romaticism and the cutting edge was represented by a glut of arty, guitarless electro acts, the weekly pop press was, in some ways, more exciting than the soundtrack.

The tale Hoskyns tells contemplates both the shifting musical landscape and the trials and tensions of running a rock magazine when the competition was fierce, fast and furious. Although Cover is would-be writer Kip Wilson’s fictional employer, comments about the New Musical Express hint at the maelstrom of journalistic activity at the time, when very real, fellow inkies, Melody Maker and Sounds, were also patrolling that waterfront of new music with a keen and highly competitive eye on the changing trends.

Kip Wilson is a loner and emotionally empty, stumbling from unfulfilling relationships with family, women and men, a middle class drop-out snagged on the thorns of London squatsville, struggling to find his place and his voice through the clackety clack of a clapped-out typewriter. Somewhat cliched visions of the artist in the garret come quickly to mind.

Yet the story takes off, both structurally and stylistically, when Wilson encounters a new and dazzling singer called Mina, a middle European marriage of Marlene Dietrich, Siouxsie Sioux and Patti Smith, who brings her dangerous brand of punkish jazz to London and attracts a feverish review from the journalist who is at the heart of the piece.

Wilson meets Mina, forges a bond and hatches a voyeuristic obsession with the crooning Teuton, before joining her on an American tour, sending florid disptaches from the frontline of the Mid-West to Cover but then discovering that his blistering and intense reporting neither solves his romantic puzzles nor, curiously, resolves his professional ambitions.

The ending is surprising, quite shocking, but at least turns the drama from a rather pathetic, if occasionally touching, cri de coeur to something closer to an expressionist thriller and escapes the indulgences of a mere roman à clef.

The prose in this novel comes in to two distinct forms – the principal narrative is stripped down and verging on the colourless, functional yet hardly compelling, but when Hoskyns, a one-time NME contributor and now a key figure behind the web-based Rock’s Backpages, brings Wilson in to play and utilses his concocted reviews, interviews and features on Mina, all verbatim extracts from the pages of Cover, then the book really comes to life and  propels the story forward with a verve and vigour.

It is almost as if Hoskyns’ writing can only find fifth gear when he adopts the role of journalist; as novelist, his words have a dry objectivity that fail to truly  inspire, but his gig write-ups and his account of the US trek are riddled with the kind of wit and wordplay that characterised the best of NME’s output in that golden age from the mid-1970s and for a decade after that. So The Lonely Planet Boy is a paradoxical affair, verging, possibly quite deliberately, on the schizophrenic in its register.

The debate about the notion of the rock’n’roll novel has gone on for half a century, the debate about the rock press novel rather less intently. The Lonely Planet Boy is a little bit of both and, on publication ten years ago, attracted some warm praise from, loosely speaking, fellow travellers to Hoskyns.

Nick Hornby called the book “sharp, fast-paced and fun. Anyone who bought a record, went to a gig or tried to flog a review copy in the 80s should read [it]”. Jonathan Coe, whose novel of 1970s life The Rotters’ Club has superficial echoes of Hoskyns’ work and has just become a justly acclaimed BBC television adaptation, commented: “A wonderfully, sure-footed tragi-comedy about creative madness and those who feed off it. If, like me, you think that life’s too short to read more than one rock’n’roll novel, then you need look no further: this is as good as they come”.

In my view, Hornby and Coe over-rate this piece somewhat but it is, nonetheless, an interesting slice through an intriguing period in the UK rock press. Hoskyns has, over the years, written a series of excellent portraits of rock and its surroundings – from biographies of Prince and the Band to potent descriptions of the scenes of LA and San Francisco – and it is in these fields rather than in cult literature that his métier, I think, actually rests.

Note: The Lonely Planet Boy is still available via Amazon. You can find out more about Barney Hoskyns, his writing and in his inspirations in the feature Q&E in this issue of Chapter&Verse