Voyeuristic as it doubtless is, I must confess a serious weakness for memoirs built around anecdotes of extreme booze and drug intake, all the better when the subject is a little down the scale of notoriety. Patrick Duff’s first book, published nearly 25 years after his best-known band Strangelove folded (The Singer is titled after his role), has ample content for rubberneckers like me; if you followed the fortunes of the group at the time, this might be expected. Equally, you might have remained unaware of what Duff did next, and he’s eager to fill you in over nearly 400 pages.

A Bristol group who existed from the early to late 1990s at a slight distance from much of the era’s local scene, Strangelove released three albums, toured with Radiohead and Suede and scored a couple of top 40 singles. They split shortly after their biggest headline show to date, and a little longer after Duff – an indiscriminate caner, but a drinker first and foremost – quit intoxicants for good. In the ignoble tradition of such rock recollections, his self-destruction makes for a litany of great anecdotes, many from before the band had really began.

Dotted through this earthly pleasure and pain are colourful claims of interactions with the spirit realm, or at least non-human founts of wisdom. This shouldn’t be too surprising from someone who walked away from the music scene to live in the woods outside Bristol for two years, but The Singer is grounded and self-deprecating for the most part, even when its author winds up in Cape Town being told by a Black local that – having met Duff – he’s learned white people can be worthy of respect.