Words versus music

If writing songs takes so much less effort, why do successful musicians humiliate themselves by producing novels? And what leads a successful author to dabble in rock? Steve Jelbert regrets the occasions when two worlds collide

Writing a song is easy. Stories abound of classics dashed off in less time than it takes to make a sample fit into a drum pattern. The central riff of "Anarchy in the UK" was made up on the spot when a cocky Glen Matlock was goaded into showing the other Pistols a new song he claimed he'd written. "Hey Jude" was supposedly knocked off in the back of a taxi. The Sixties soul men Dan Penn and Chips Moman were famed for dashing off songs in minutes (though none of them addressed the issues Moman must have had with the parents who named him Chips).

But writing a book – that's tricky. It takes months, sometimes years, to write even a bad one. The music business and the book trade are about as far apart as you can imagine. One is populated by desperate attention-seekers who bitch about their rivals when not luxuriating in their own genius. And so is music, but the fans are 30 years younger and more likely to visit hotel rooms uninvited.

While pop is about a battle for chart positions, publishing is more sedate. Books dribble into the shops with little fanfare and sell steadily, rather than hitting the shelves with a wave of publicity.

But occasionally pop's performers have a go. This month, a couple of books are being released by people better known behind a microphone. Louise Wener, once singer of the Britpop act Sleeper, spent nine months writing Goodnight Steve McQueen, a heavily plugged story of how a hopeless band trapped in the London toilet circuit miraculously get lucky (and – let's face it – she should know). She should be congratulated for her astute realisation that as publishers have no clue about the mechanisms of the music industry, they can hardly be expected to spot the gaping holes in her plotting.

More interesting is Steve Earle's short-story collection Doghouse Roses, which has just appeared in paperback. Heralded on its cover with a supreme puff from Jay McInerney, who was once a writer himself, comparing the country-rock veteran to Steinbeck, Kerouac and Bukowski, it includes gems such as the title story, about a drug-addled country rock musician dumped by his girlfriend in an attempt to make him clean up. Short of calling his character Reeve Merle (he prefers Bobby Charles), he couldn't be more blatantly autobiographical. There's more than a whiff of vanity publishing here – though, to be fair, Earle has certainly had a hard life.

There are a few precedents. The late Phil Lynott, in an attempt to reinforce his bardic appeal, published a book of poetry. Bill Drummond, once of KLF, is an accomplished writer, and his pal Mark Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp) keeps knocking out books. Shane MacGowan, now the nation's leading candidate for a celebrity liver transplant, has some understanding of the discipline, if not actual discipline. The entertaining digressions that make up A Drink with Shane MacGowan often veer toward fiction. Shane lets it be known that he was the hardest lad at his school, which was Westminster College.

Remarkably, Nick Cave's novel And the Ass Saw the Angel remains in print two decades after its publication, now in a Penguin series alongside better-known names such as Garcia Marquez and Orwell. Cave's fantastical Faulkner tribute, set in America's Deep South – which brings to mind Spike Milligan's Ireland-set Puckoon, in that he'd never visited the place when he wrote it – may read like a 250-page Elvis monologue, all "uh"s and "ah"s, but it clearly has some appeal.

For performers, the instant gratification of playing to an enthusiastic crowd simply cannot be compared to the polite applause at a reading. More surprising is the complete mess that otherwise acclaimed writers make when they dabble with with the subject of pop. Wener's book may be trite, but it's chick-lit (albeit with an unconvincing male narrator) and is fighting it out with Lisa Jewell and Eva Rice (Sir Tim's daughter. She's dreadful).

But what of Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a pointless reworking of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with rock shoehorned in somewhere, so bad that music fans may have been tempted to ring the Iranian embassy to report the author's whereabouts? Or the otherwise impeccable Elmore Leonard's useless Be Cool?

Then there's the Hornby-isation of music. Writing about pop for The New Yorker's is like being the opera correspondent of the Daily Star, surely. For all the hoo-ha about High Fidelity, it wasn't a book about obsessive behaviour; it was about a type of obsessive behaviour, and a boring one at that. Where would you have rather spent a night c1990? Listening to a selection played by a pharmaceutically fuelled Alan McGee, ever more desperate to find something even better to play you, or chez Hornby, eating to tasteful background music? Martin Millar's excellent Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me truly captured the thrill of being 14 and in awe of your favourite band. In fact, when the fortysomething Millar met Robert Plant, Led Zep's lead singer, recently, he was still in awe.

Which leaves us with Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, now nearly 30 years old. More of a dissection of celebrity than a rock novel, it's about a star who has gone Awol, and is given to such arcane discussions, you suspect he may eventually emerge not in Goa or Amsterdam, but in the liberal-arts faculty of a small Midwestern university.

More bizarre was the route taken by Camden Joy, the nom de plume of one Tom Adelman, who penned a road novel (brilliantly entitled Boy Island) about the American college-radio favourites Cracker, even putting himself into the band as their drummer. They did not take such a betrayal of trust from their former T-shirt-seller well, yet somehow Adelman's novel seems a more honest attempt at rock fiction. Though he should really have changed the names, at least you can hear for yourself what the band actually sound like.

'Goodnight Steve McQueen' by Louise Wener, Flame, £10. 'Doghouse Roses' by Steve Earle, Vintage, £6.99