The best music books of 2015

Eye-openers from Grace Jones and Jon Savage, but for sheer, sharp entertainment, no one beats Tom Jones

• Best of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian’s writers and critics

There are bigger books and more concise books, and books edited by people capable of spotting mistakes like references to a rock’n’roll classic called “Linda Lou” (it was “Linda Lu”, as any fule kno). But there might not be another book in this year’s crop that portrays so sharply and entertainingly the life of a true star as Tom Jones’s autobiography.

Over the Top and Back (Michael Joseph), written with Giles Smith, is good value on the singer’s early experience of life among the teddy boys and petticoated girls of Pontypridd, his reluctance to go down the pit, and fatherhood at 17. It frolics through the 60s, when “It’s Not Unusual” positioned Jones somewhere between two of his idols, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, whose footsteps he followed to Las Vegas, where matrons bombarded him with their knickers. But then it gets interesting, as he copes with the doldrums: a period when the hit records stop and he recognises that he has become nothing more than “the coal for the money train” driven by his management.

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