By now, the parameters of the conventional rock-and-its-environs autobiography have been pretty much established: anecdotal tales of bandmates and bedmates; the struggle from rags to riches (and occasionally back to rags); drink, drugs, debaucheries and rehab; triumphs and tragedies; bad deals and bad trips; hubris and happiness; roads of excess eventually leading to the palaces of wisdom.

The archetype was probably Keith Richards’s relentlessly entertaining Life, or the artful blend of self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation found in Pete Townshend’s Who I Am and Elton John’s Me. Also at the top of the heap is Miles Davis’s Miles: The Autobiography (expertly curated by Quincy Troupe), a superb evocation of the jazz life featuring enough uses of the Oedipal compound noun to give even Samuel L Jackson pause.

Now we have three performers born in the second half of the 1940s: Patti Smith, performance poet turned rock star turned award-winning memoirist, in 1946; Cat Stevens, mod-era teenage pop star turned bedsit-soundtracking acoustic troubadour turned Britain’s briefly best-known Muslim convert, in 1948; and Lionel Richie, funk band sideman turned