MUSIC MEMOIRS

Buzzin’ Bez White Rabbit, £20

Few autobiographies are as wide ranging as Mark Berry’s.

The Bolton-born detective inspector’s son, better known as Bez, found fame as the maraca-shaking dancer with Happy Mondays. But danger and crime were never far away.

At some point in the late 90s – precise dates and indeed entire years elude him – Bez was lured to an ambush by a Manchester drug gang who abducted and tortured him at gunpoint in a derelict house.

He survived by making his balaclavaclad tormentors laugh, attacking the “friend” who had betrayed him and leaving the gang “roaring at the sight and sound of this kid being pathetic… the kidnappers suddenly just tell me to get the f*** out of there”.

It’s hard to marry scenes like that with the Bez we saw performing “like Bambi on ice crossed with Frank Spencer” on ITV’s Dancing On Ice.

In this engaging memoir, the Celebrity Gogglebox regular comes clean about his past as a drug middleman, shifting hashish between suppliers and dealers. But being the chemical generation’s pop-eyed Pied Piper has not hampered Berry’s second career as a television entertainment regular, turning up on shows such as Blankety Blank and Celebrity MasterChef.

He details his spells in jail – strongly denying his domestic violence conviction – and recalls the time when he was threatened at gunpoint by a New York gang while high as a kite on crack cocaine.

The closest he came to death was crashing his motorbike into a wall en route to a gig in 1999.

Seriously injured, he caught an MRSA superbug in hospital, suffered multi-organ failure, went into a month-long coma, and hallucinated that he was visited by Billy Connolly and Terry Venables.

Bez remembers nothing between 1989 and ’93 but Shaun Ryder is on hand to fill in the gaps in his usual witty style.

You don’t need to be a fan, or to endorse Bez’s lifestyle choices, to be amused by his exploits.