John Robb writes like he speaks: eloquently, breathlessly and with a wicked sense of humour. This new memoir is, as you’d expect, crammed full of eye-watering anecdotes of youthful folly, loss, creative energy and a battle cry for individualism.

Of course there are nods to his days at Sounds, where he was the first music critic to interview a certain “sleepy” young Kurt Cobain, how he formed The Membranes through sheer need, and tussles with Happy Mondays, Patti Smith, Dinosaur Jr, Oasis, and Ozzy to name but a few, but it’s his intimate portraits of outsiderdom that really resonate for me: the best art always comes from leftfield. and a sense of alienation. “I was a hermit crab sheltering inside a throwaway plastic toy on the beach at the end of the road to nowhere,” he muses.

His prose is pyrotechnic; often lyrical , constructed like the thrill of the three minute hero/es, but there’s a bittersweet tang to it too. From the faded seaside seventies in Blackpool to the dayglo blast of punk, Robb speaks to the importance of not just traversing your own path, but creating it. He eschews all that clichéd elder statesman stuff: he’s as restless and hungry for new music now as he ever was.

Raw, candid and often incredibly moving, Punk Rock Ruined My Life… is one of the finest music memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. If you don’t have an art crush on him by the end of this book, you’re a massive twat. End of.