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John Lennon started it all back in 1964 when the lovable moptop assembled his Milliganesque black humour and primitive expressive drawings into his first book, Spaniard In the Works and followed it up with the equally successful sequel Right hand Draw and then retired from publicly displaying his drawings until he met Yoko many years later.

Patti Smith, Jim Carroll and Leonard Cohen were all published poets and storywriters before they took up music. The Patti Smith Band began as the nucleus of Patti reading her written works with the accompaniment of Lenny Kaye on guitar and she has continued to publish various works along with her musical career. After early fame and success in a literary career, Leonard’s muse however took him so deeply into music and lyric writing, that he took a 20 year break between books. First published at 17, Jim Carroll gained acclaim for The Basketball Diaries and then decided to live out his rock n roll fantasy for a couple of years leaving his moment of musical immortality with People Who Died , he returned to poetry and has been working on his first novel for the past 10 years.

First novels can be tricky; Bob Dylan’s Tarantula was a disappointingly impenetrable stream of consciousness book about nothing in particular, before he redeemed himself recently with masterful musical memoir Chronicles Volume One of hopefully many, which started life as leaflet notes for a series of CD re-releases. Nick Cave’s And The Ass Saw the Angel was a ponderously paced, overlong indulgence in Southern gothic that did not compare to his masterful lyrics. Billy Corgan’s debut book of poetry was so badly hammered by critics and consumers alike that we’ve heard no news of a follow up. In Australia, Steve Kilbey has dabbled in various non-musical areas including spoken-word performance and collections of poetry and prose, beginning with his 1987 book Earthed, released with an accompanying solo CD, while he currently blogs continuous prose and poetry on his website. Billy Thorpe produced three very successful, energetically written and lived books, apparently edited down from much longer works that will hopefully someday see the light of day in his absence. While in Melbourne Stephen Cummings has penned two well-reviewed novels; his flight of imagination Wonderboy and Lightning’s Girl, based on his early years in the music scene.

Then there is the sub-genre of confessional drug and tell books; Dave Navarro chronicled a year of drug debauchery and decadence in prose and photo in Don’t Try This At Home, a coffee table book for your local coke dealer. After writing many songs about his drug addictions and rehabs Anthony Keidis wrote about it all over again in his walk on the LA wildside book Scar Tissue, while Motley Crue collaborated on the hilarious and horrifying Spinal Tap-on-steroids Dirt, now Nikki Sixx has gone solo with the dauntingly titled Heroin Diaries, another year in the half-life hell book and Tommy Lee just won’t shut up! Dee Dee Ramone wrote Legend Of A Rock Star (guess who it was about!) and a supernatural junkie thriller set in the notorious Chelsea Hotel.

All of which makes the first of the genre, Diary Of A Rock N Roll Star by Mott the Hoople singer Ian Hunter printed in 1974 seem positively quaint by comparison, although it was at the time the first behind the scenes view of what it was like to be in a band, albeit cleaned up for print.

The demented Shamanic genius Julian Cope began his writing career with two books based on his band years in Liverpool and his brief flirtation with the pop charts in Teardrop Explodes, then wrote the Holy Grail for krautrock fans, the incredibly researched and exuberant Krautrocksampler, recently followed up with Japrocksampler and since has produced two magnificent volumes of gonzo scholarship, The Modern Antiquarian, a survey of ancient sites in Britain and followed that up with the similarly-themed, massive and remarkable, The Megalith European, both hailed by academics as much as by his acolytes.

Currently retired from music, Henry Rollins has also juggled stand-up, spoken-word shows and a radio and TV career with penning 30 books about himself by his own publishing company; any other company would have told him to get an editor.Even more prolific and self-governing is my favourite eccentric, Billy Childish who alongside releasing 100 albums under various guises and painting over 2500 works, has also published 40 poetry books and four novels in his spare time!

But surely even more ambitious is recent PhD in Astronomy and post-Queen magnate Brian May who has just released his first scholarly and modestly-titled tome.