BOOK REVIEW: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace by Robert Polito

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in March 2026.

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace by Robert Polito, out now, WW Norton & Co, £25

Received wisdom dictates that Bob Dylan’s imperial phase was in the ’60s and ’70s, with everything after that little more than an extended footnote of only occasional interest. That, argues the celebrated author, poet and academic Robert Polito in After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, is arrant nonsense. Dylan’s genius didn’t fade, it continued to evolve and mutate in all sorts of fascinating ways. 

His persuasive thesis unfolds from around 1991 to 2024, 30-plus years of peripatetic creativity during which Dylan released 13 albums, played over 3,000 dates on his never-ending tour, published two books, co-wrote and starred in a film, hosted a weekly radio show between 2006 and 2009, exhibited his paintings and sculptures in galleries all over the world, and received – with typical wariness – the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Polito provides in-depth analysis of all the key works from this period in a kinetic prose style befitting his subject. His fluid torrent of questions, allusions, digressions and theories never loses focus, there is method to his idiosyncratic approach to this material.

It flits back and forwards in time, thus emphasising his overall point that, for Dylan, history isn’t a thing of the past, but rather something that is constantly in flux, a vast tapestry of characters, incidents and places, an infinitely repeating hall of mirrors, a swirling collage of facts, memories, fantasies and dreams he can draw upon to create timeless works of art.  

The Dylan we find here is a voracious collector of weird Americana, a man steeped in decades of popular culture – both so-called high and low – who continues to delight in confounding expectations.

While it’s impossible to imagine Dylan ever reading a book about himself, I suspect he’d get a kick out of this one. It’s thoughtful, enlightening, slightly offbeat and never dull.

BOOK REVIEW: Ringo: A Fab Life by Tom Doyle

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in January 2026.

Ringo: A Fab Life by Tom Doyle is out now (New Modern, £25)

It’s reasonable to assume that no one these days, apart perhaps from the most pig-headed fans of hack jokes and received wisdom, regards Ringo Starr as anything less than a great drummer with an instinctive knack for enhancing a song. A characterful player and unique stylist who never knowingly drew attention to himself, he was the perfect drummer for The Beatles, and therefore the perfect drummer. QED.

But as Tom Doyle observes in Ringo: A Fab Life, his engrossing, affectionate and well researched biography of Sir Richard Starkey, maybe we’re still guilty of treating him as a two-dimensional caricature. Good old Ringo, the jovial, lovable, unpretentious, easy-going clown. The happy-go-lucky everyman Beatle.

And while that persona is certainly true to an extent – Doyle rarely refers to his subject as “Starr”, as it’s just too jarringly formal – the book reminds us that Ringo endured a traumatic childhood scarred by life-threatening illnesses. Doyle is no glib armchair psychologist, but he clearly illustrates that Ringo’s adult anxieties can be traced back to his difficult formative years.

A sensitive character prone to self-doubt, he was the first Beatle to leave – albeit briefly – when that surrogate family became dysfunctional in 1968. All he ever wanted to do was play drums with his friends. Doyle emphasises that simple, touching fact throughout.

His bleak account of Ringo’s post-Beatles descent into alcoholism is a valuable corrective to anyone who thinks those Brandy Alexander Hollywood years were remotely amusing. When Ringo and his wife Barbara Bach enter rehab in the late ’80s, the last few chapters/decades unfold serenely. They’ve been together ever since.  

You’ll also find a heroically detailed deep dive into Ringo’s erratic film career. For that reason alone, Doyle deserves a medal.

BOOK REVIEW: Bless Me Father: A Life Story by Kevin Rowland

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in September 2025.

Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Kevin Rowland, out now, Ebury Spotlight, £19.65

As far back as he can remember, Dexys Midnight Runners lynchpin Kevin Rowland has struggled with anxiety and a deep-seated inferiority complex. Even while topping the early '80s charts with irrefutable pop classics Geno and Come on Eileen, Rowland was beset by doubt, guilt, paranoia and self-destructive impulses.

But he also pursued his singular creative vision with a burning and utterly dedicated intensity. He believed, quite rightly, that Dexys were something special. He just didn't particularly like himself.

In Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Rowland bares his sensitive soul with commendable - if sometimes alarming - honesty. An addict who's been in recovery for over thirty years, his autobiography is full of touchingly sincere apologies to everyone he mistreated as an angry, difficult, insular young man. It's also full of praise and gratitude, and he never wallows in self-pity or mealy-mouthed excuses.

Rowland's devout Irish Catholic father, who never blessed his wayward son with a single word of praise, would usually be cast as the villain in a lesser, more self-serving memoir. Rowland does, of course, understand that he was always seeking his father's approval - "I was desperate to prove I wasn't useless" - but he clearly loved the man, faults and all. Their relationship is at the heart of this story.

The chapters devoted to Rowland's post-Dexys years of cocaine addiction are relentlessly grim. On the dole and living in a threadbare flat, he'd been royally screwed by a former manager and had to declare bankruptcy. But he survived, got clean, and now lives comfortably on his songwriting royalties. He's in a better place.

Rowland is a true artist, an idiosyncratic aesthete who flourished during an era when working-class 'weirdos' were allowed to gatecrash the mainstream. We will not see his like again.

Book Review: MICK JAGGER by Philip Norman

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 20th October 2012.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/features/book-review-mick-jagger-by-philip-norman-1-2589474

MICK JAGGER

Philip Norman

HarperCollins, £20

Paul Whitelaw

When Michael Philip Jagger, corporate head of the Rolling Stones empire, was asked to deliver his autobiography in the early '80s, the ghost-written results were deemed so irredeemably dull that the publishers were forced to cancel the £1 million advance and scrap the entire project. His exasperated editor quipped that it should've been titled The Diary of a Nobody.

Contrast that with the colourful – if not always reliable – content of fellow Stone Keith Richards' best selling memoir, Life, from 2010, which, in between hair-raising anecdotes and scholarly ruminations on open-G tuning, functioned as a kind of frustrated public letter to his estranged old friend. The Stones are celebrating their 50^th anniversary this year, with another mega-tour rumoured to follow in 2013, but Richards claims he hasn't set foot in Jagger's dressing room in over 20 years.

So what happened? How is it possible that a legendary figure such as Jagger, who's lived a life liberally festooned with dramatic incident, could think of nothing interesting to say about himself? And how did it get to the stage where he barely communicates with the man with whom he wrote some of the world's greatest rock songs?

Philip Norman's hefty, even-handed biography seeks to dig behind the studied public façade and bore into the heavily guarded heart of this paradoxical icon. That he succeeds in presenting a rounded portrait of such a slippery character is doubly remarkable given Jagger's predictable refusal to have anything to do with the book.

And yet, despite this glaring Jagger-shaped hole, Norman may well have written the only biography of a living entertainer to actually benefit from the absence of its subject. After all, the author argues, when have you ever read a remotely revealing interview with Mick Jagger? From the moment he strutted onto the world's stage in the mid-'60s, his public pronouncements have always been couched in feigned indifference and, in later years, a maddening insistence that he's forgotten the finer details of his past.

A highly intelligent, shrewd professional, this is clearly a convenient avoidance technique honed over the years to reveal as little of himself as possible. Famously, Jagger is a song-writer who, despite penning countless lyrics, has provided barely a hint of autobiography in his work.

This diplomatic narcissist obviously cares deeply about how he's perceived, but his unwavering commitment – to borrow ex-paramour Marianne Faithfull's choice phrase – to The Tyranny of Cool prohibits him from ever suggesting otherwise in public.

Norman repeatedly returns to the Tyranny of Cool motif throughout the story, as a persuasive way of deciphering Jagger's often self-defeating and callous behaviour. Despite pushing 70, this still limber force of nature is arguably the most vainglorious exponent of the perpetual adolescence enjoyed by pampered rock stars.

Although Norman rightly celebrates Jagger's immense talent and historical impact, a portrait emerges of a selfish, charming, controlling man who's had his every whim, whether fiscal or carnal, indulged almost without question throughout his long career. And yet despite his keen sense of self-awareness, Jagger doesn't seem to realise that his endless series of affairs with women less than half his age has transformed a one-time cultural powerhouse into an increasingly pathetic parody of himself. That, I suppose, is what happens when the word you've heard least in your life is “no”.

Norman has assembled an addictive narrative mired in sex and, to a lesser extent, drugs (Jagger was always too sensible to overindulge), but thankfully he isn't interested in salacious gossip.

An esteemed biographer of, among others, The Beatles, John Lennon, and the Stones themselves (an updated edition of his exhaustive 1984 biography is published this month), his reputation for thorough research is compounded on virtually every page. Norman is the sort of detail-hungry biographer who'll delightedly note that an Abbott and Costello comedy prophetically titled Money For Jam was playing at the local cinema in Dartford when the notoriously stingy Jagger was born.

Having gone back over interviews conducted for his previous Stones tome, he's also gathered fresh, record-straightening yet dignified contributions from the likes of Jagger's former lovers Chrissie Shrimpton and Marsha Hunt (who gave birth to his first child, which he briefly tried to disown), and Maggie Abbot, his one-time film agent, who grants fascinating insight into the numerous film offers that came his way during his thwarted bid for Hollywood stardom. It's tantalising to imagine what directors such as Hal Ashby, Steven Spielberg, John Boorman and Franco Zeffirelli could've done with Jagger's unique charisma.

Despite his penchant for detail, Norman could never be accused of being a dry, academic biographer. Adopting a wry tone befitting his habitually self-mocking subject, he rarely passes up an opportunity for an ironic aside. Indeed, at times he'd be best advised to avoid a tempting pun or gag, as they often irritate rather than amuse. Perverting the title of the Stones' first US album to Europe's Newest Shitmakers? Describing ageing groupies as “gurgling matrons”? Really, Philip? And he does tend to repeat himself as the book goes on. Oh for the hand of a stricter editor.

Nevertheless, having breathed new life into familiar material, he's written what must surely be regarded as the definitive account of Jagger's remarkable life. Its very existence will, of course, vex and embarrass Sir Mick himself, who would clearly prefer it if people only wrote about him in the manner of a glowing press release. But you can be sure that, whenever the subject inevitably arises during future interviews, he'll casually dismiss it as an irrelevance. The Tyranny of Cool will never be vanquished.

Mick Jagger by Philip Norman is published 4^th October (HarperCollins, £20)