THE OX

THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROCK STARS

PAUL REES

Constable, 352pp, £20

There was a mixed reception for this book – produced by a former Q editor, and with help from the subject’s family, and leaning heavily on an unfinished memoir by the late bass guitar player for The Who. John Entwistle died at 57 in Las Vegas after a night of sex, drink and cocaine, and was just the type of rock star that his demise suggests.

Writing in the Observer, Jude Rogers noted that the rock memoir – once the province of selfcongratulatory anecdotes about sexual misbehaviour and chemical excess – has been transformed in recent years by the likes of Viv Albertine and Chrissie Hynde: ‘Next to them, this biography feels desperately passé, from its subheading onwards.’

The book, like its subject, has early promise: Entwhistle’s sensitive writing about his childhood is quoted, and the reader gets a (patchy) sense of just how ‘thrilling The Who’s music, and Entwistle’s urgent, virtuosic bass-playing, could be’. But ‘The Who’s music then takes a backseat as Entwistle’s other “greatest rock star” attributes take over, namely being oafish, buying crazy things for his mansion and enjoying the company of women who aren’t his wife.’ […] ‘If Entwistle was the last of the great rock stars,’ she concluded, ‘then good riddance. Let’s hope music memoirs of this nature go the same way.’ Jonah Raskin in the

New York Journal of Books, was friendlier, but warned: ‘Like so many other biographies of famous musicians, The Ox offers a cautionary tale about a man who began songs and couldn’t finish them, much as he started his autobiography and never got to the end.’