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It’s always a bit of a disappointment when you find out that an autobiography by someone you admire has been ghostwritten. You expect it of certain celebrities, but not of people who are known for their literary output or intellect. It would’ve been a shock to find out for example that Bob Dylan’s brilliant Chronicles had in fact been written by someone else. Dylan is known for his lyrics as much as for his music. The fact that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature was a timely acknowledgement that song lyrics are a form of literature. Bob Dylan is a poet. Other musical poets have also put their story down on paper: Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Morrissey. They all turned out to be fine writers, as you would’ve expected, and no ghost writer is credited with helping them put the story down.

One of my favourite musical autobiographies of recent years is Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep. Lanegan too is a songwriter of renown and much admired for his dark and poetic lyrics. The stories in his autobiography are strong, the style of writing is often quite brilliant, especially when writing about scoring drugs or putting down other musicians. (There is a brilliant description of Liam Gallagher.)

He kicks off his autobiography like this: ‘With the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, I was born by C-section in November 1964 and then I came up on the wrong side of the Cascade Mountains in the small, eastern Washington town of Ellenburg.’ Not a bad start, but it turns out it wasn’t Lanegan who wrote these words; there was a ghostwriter involved… Is it laziness? A lack of talent? Too much pressure from a publisher to finish the book?

Another brilliant lyricist (shall we just say ‘poet’?) who isn’t exactly shy with words was Mark E. Smith, frontman of The Fall. I loved his autobiography, Renegade, and had no doubt that I was reading his own words. But again, a ghostwriter did the job for him. Smith writes about himself as a literary person (his band was named after a novel by Camus), talks about writing and literature and I can’t help but wondering why he couldn’t get his act together and write the story out himself.

Having said that, Renegade is the best kind of ghostwritten autobiography imaginable. This is Smith talking to a skilled writer: I expect that all the words we read, did actually flow from the man himself, but they were pulled out of him by ghost Austin Collings. It has the same quality of voice that defines Life by Keith Richards, ghostwritten by James Fox who recently worked with David Bailey on his autobiography Look Again. I never expected Keith Richards to sit down and write up his autobiography and I’m pleased that someone else did the job for him. It sounds like Keith and I don’t think we could’ve got any closer to his version of his much-publicised life.

Writing takes patience and discipline and these traits don’t necessarily gel with rock and roll. Mark E. Smith is not someone who likes looking back: his whole work is about the here and now. He speaks of ‘regressive idealism’ and calls it dangerous.

‘Kids growing up and hearing their moms and dads talk about how great 1976 and 1981 were. There have never been any great years. You get the odd moment here and there, but never a clean year of wonder.’

Publishers must prefer it to have a ghostwriter involved. It’s more likely that the book will actually be written. And I’ve never heard anyone complain about the conceit of a ghostwritten autobiography. Perhaps it’s better to be disappointed about the fact that they haven’t written their own autobiography, then having the potential discovery that they are in fact terrible writers.