MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

SOBER by Tony Adams with Ian Ridley

(S&S £8.99, 368 pp) TONY ADAMS’S successful 1998 memoir, Addicted, told how his legendary Arsenal football career was overshadowed by his alcoholism.

Two decades on, a second memoir, Sober, fills in the detail of the years since August 16, 1996, when a 29year-old Adams concluded, after a four-day bender, that enough was enough.

Plenty has happened since that day: ‘I’ve had both parents die. I’ve had three more children with a beautiful new wife . . . I’ve had highs and lows in and out of football. Not had a drink through any of it.’

Adams’s courageous honesty started a public conversation about alcoholism, and his charity, Sporting Chance, helps athletes suffering addictions.

Sober is an inspiring account of second chances, and an eventful life after Arsenal, his first love.

CAN’T STAND UP FOR FALLING DOWN by Allan Jones

(Bloomsbury £9.99, 352 pp) IN 1974, the bestselling music paper Melody Maker advertised for a junior reporter. Allan Jones, then 21, applied and got the job.

His riotous book looks back over the glory years of rock journalism: among a plethora of striking encounters, Patti Smith’s sulphurous 1976 press conference, during which she hurled a plate of sandwiches at Jones’s head, stands out. Lemmy of Motorhead offers Jones drugs as genteelly as though they were at a vicarage tea party: ‘Not too early for you, I hope.’

A 30-minute interview with Van Morrison ends abruptly when the irascible musician stops speaking, mid-sentence, the second Jones’s time is up, while an infinitely more charming David Bowie admits his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, drove him to the brink of insanity.

A YORKSHIRE VET THROUGH THE SEASONS by Julian Norton

(Michael O’Mara £8.99, 256 pp) JULIAN NORTON is a familiar figure from the Channel 5 television series The Yorkshire Vet.

His latest book recounts a year in his working life, beginning in winter when he is called out to a variety of chilly emergencies.

One touching story is of a black swan with an injured leg, whose partner pecked at the door of a nearby house, apparently seeking help for his mate. Springtime means lambing, and an emergency caesarean to deliver the last lamb of the season. While summer brings a colicky young horse with an aristocratic owner who is not over- prompt in paying her vet bills.

As summer turns to autumn, the patients keep coming: a herd of cattle with lead poisoning, and Dougie the parrot with his broad Yorkshire accent.