Killing Bono by Neil McCormick (Pocket Books 2004)

I always knew I would be famous.

By the time I left school, at seventeen, my life was planned down to the finest detail. I would form a rock band, make a series of epoch-shifting albums, play technologically mind-blowing concerts in the biggest stadiums on the planet until I was universally acknowledged as the greatest superstar of my era. And I would indulge in all manner of diversions along the way: make films, write books, break hearts, befriend my idols . . . oh - and promote world peace, feed the poor and save the planet while I was at it.

You might think I was just another teenage airhead with fantasies of omnipotence. Indeed, there were plenty around me at the time who did their best to persuade me that this was the case. But I wasn't about to be put off by lesser mortals jealous of my talent. Because I knew, deep, deep in the very core of my being, that this wasn't just another empty dream. This was my destiny . . . 

So there I was, thirty-five years old, sitting in a shabby, unheated little excuse for an office above a bookie's in Piccadilly, watching the rain drizzle down my single, grimy window, wondering where it had all gone wrong. I'd wanted to be a rock star and wound up becoming a rock critic. To compound my torment, I was suffering from a bad case of writer's block with my newspaper deadline looming and the fucking telephone hadn't stopped ringing all morning with a succession of PRs pestering me about their shitty rock bands, all of whom I secretly resented for, I suppose, just being more famous than me. But at least talking on the phone gave me an excuse for not writing my column.

"It better be good," I snapped into the receiver.

"This is the voice of your conscience," announced my caller in a gravelly, wasted Dublin accent that reeked of smoke, late nights and fine wines.

"Bono," I said in recognition.

"You can run but you can't hide," he laughed.

"The way I feel right now, I don't think I could even run," I sighed.

It was, indeed, Bono: rock legend, international superstar, roving ambassador for world peace and (though it is unlikely to feature prominently on his CV) a schoolfriend of mine from Mount Temple Comprehensive.

Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello by Graeme Thomson (Canongate Books 2004)

Ironically, the two stand-out tracks on the record were the sparsest, the ones that mostly steered clear of sonic gimmicks. 'Pills and Soap' was a stark, stabbing piano track based on Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message', rush-released as a single in May on Elvis's own IMP label and then supposedly deleted - in actual fact, it never was - on the eve of the 1983 general election. Loosely inspired by a film about the abuse of animals which had made Elvis turn vegetarian, it hid a scabarous - if obscure - political viewpoint beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, 'Shipbuilding' stood up against the very best of his recorded output. While always conceding that Robert Wyatt's version was the original, Elvis liked the song so much he wanted it to be heard by the widest number of people possible. To make his version even more distinctive, he visualised a trumpet solo on the track.

Chet Baker wasn't the first choice. Langer recalls that Wynton Marsalis was discussed but wasn't in the country, while a typically undaunted Elvis had Miles Davis as his original first pick, but it so happened that Baker was in London in May playing a residency at The Canteen. His melancholy, melodic trumpet sound and remarkable good looks had made him a 1950's poster boy, but he had since descended into a grim cycle of cocaine and heroin addiction which gripped him until his death in 1988.

By his own admission, Baker had never heard of Elvis Costello, but when Elvis sounded him out at The Canteen, he quickly agreed to play for scale. 'It was a cash deal,' recalled Elvis. 'He just came in; it may well have been the next day.' Elvis offered to double the jazzman's standard union fee, and few could doubt he was worth every penny.

'One of the best things we ever did was 'Shipbuilding',' recalls Bruce Thomas, still moved by the experience many years on. 'That was probably one of the musical high points. Chet Baker, this wizened corpse on death's door, strung out, just played. He followed this bass line and played his solo, so simple, with so much soul in it. It really touched me. It was one of those things that really made me think about how you judge people.'

While Langer concurs that Baker's final contribution as heard on the record was inspirational, he remembers the session being a tough one. 'We recorded the track live, but he kept blowing bum notes when we got to his solo. He was going, "This isn't jazz!" so he couldn't quite get it. That solo is three whole takes - the band as well - edited together, to get it to work. He was pretty spaced out.'

When the Nines Roll Over: And Other Stories by David Benioff (Plume Books 2004)

The midnight shift would have just started at the bottling plant back home where his older brother worked. If Leksi hadn't joined the army he would be there now, inside a warm building with dusty lead-glass windows, the overhead lights soft and yellow and steady. Maybe a conveyor belt had broken and Leski was asked to fix it; he saw himself replacing a cracked roller and then regrooving the rubber belt. A radio played softly and Leski chatted with the foreman about politics. Everyone knew everyone else; they had all grown up together. There were friends and there were enemies but everyone had their reasons. He would like Bobo, say, because Bobo was the goalie for their hockey club; he would hate Timur because Timur's wife was very beautiful and Timur wore tight Levi jeans that his brother sent him from America. That would be logical. That would be a life that made sense. And maybe at night he would dream of adventure, of sleeping in the snow with his rifle by his side, of storming hilltop houses and battling the Chechen terrorists, but it would just be a dream, and in the morning he would drink his coffee and read the newspaper and cluck sadly to learn that three more boys were killed in Chechnya.

(from 'The Devil Comes to Orekhovo')

The Cutting Room by Laurence Klavan (Ballantine Books 2004)

The call that changed my life did not come from Jody. It came from Alan Gilbert, perhaps the most petty of all the "trivial" men I knew.

Alan was a few years older than me. For money, he wrote the capsule descriptions of movies in the TV section of one of the New York City tabloids. ("Gone with the Wind, 1939, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable. Gal survives the Civil War." You know what I mean.) But his real love was his own public-access TV show - the half hour paid for with most of the salary from his day job - called My Movies.

On the show, Alan sat in his tiny East Village apartment and showed forgotten clips from old films, censored scenes, short subjects not seen for forty years, early pornography, and the like. Occasionally, Alan went on location to interview forgotten actors or cult directors. Mostly, though, it was just Alan, his cameraman - fellow trivial fellow Gus Ziegler - a shabby chair, a projector, a screen, a TV, and that was it. The show ran about twenty times during the week - on channel 297 or something - and chances are, if you've ever flicked around at four in the morning, you've seen him.

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (Believer Books 2004)

I know I'm wrong about this book, because everyone else in the world, including writers I love, think it's fantastic, but it Wasn't For Me. It's brilliantly written, I can see that much, and it made me think, too. But mostly I thought about why I don't know anyone like the people Fox writes about. Why are all my friends so dim and unreflective? Where did I go wrong?

Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to the house, and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring at the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying, "shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends - just a lot of cursing, and maybe some empty threats of violence.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan 2004)

His father always told both his sons not to follow him down the pit but it was hard to get away from mining when it was the only industry in town. Jackson never considered the future but he thought being a miner looked OK, the comradeship, the drinking - like being in a grown-up gang really - but his father said it was a job that you wouldn’t make a dog do, and this was a man who hated dogs. Everyone voted Labour, men and women, but they weren’t socialists, they ‘craved the fruits of capitalism' more than anyone, that’s what his father said. His father was a socialist, the bitter, chip-on-the-shoulder Scottish kind that attributed everything that had gone wrong with his life to someone else but particularly ‘capitalist bosses’.

Jackson had no idea what capitalism was and no desire to know. Francis said it was driving a Ford Consul and buying a Servis twin-tub for his mother and Jackson was the only person who knew that when Francis had become part of the first generation of eighteen-year-olds to vote last year he had put his cross next to the name of the Tory candidate, even though ‘he hadn’t a fart in hell’s chance’ of winning. Their father would have disowned Francis (possibly killed him) because the Tories wanted to wipe the miners off the face of the earth and Francis said who gives a fuck because he planned to save enough money to drive a Cadillac across the States, pausing only to salute the King at the gates of Graceland and otherwise not stopping until he hit the Pacific Highway. Their mother died the week after the election so politics weren't on anyone's mind for a while, although their father tried hard to find a way of blaming the government for the cancer that ate Fidelma up and then spat her out as a shrivelled, yellowed husk to die on a morphine drip in a side ward of the Wakefield General.

Two Way Split by Allan Guthrie (Polygon Press 2004)

Banging. Robin glanced at Eddie. More banging. Regular. Insistent. Someone pounding on the front door. Their visitor, the concerned citizen. Robin couldn't tell how Eddie was reacting behind the balaclava. More banging. It stopped and a muffled voice said, 'I'm coming in.' Silence. A shout accompanied by a screech as the wedge under the door was driven back a couple of inches. Robin set down the bag as a hand reached round the gap at the side of the door and sent the wedge tumbling across the floor. As the door swung open, Hilda dashed forward. He caught her by the wrist and dragged her in an arc straight into his arms. She wriggled until he rested the blade of the knife against her lips. She was panting heavily and her hairspray ticked the back of his throat.

'Let her go.' The man who spoke was inappropriately dressed for the cold weather in a white t-shirt and black jeans. He stood in the doorway, chill air gusting in from behind him.

'Who the fuck are you?' Eddie said.

Rude Kids: The Unfeasible Story of Viz by Chris Donald (HarperCollins 2004)

John was always keen to make a Viz TV programme. It wasn't an idea that had occurred to me, but John envisaged films and TV shows, and all the money and showbiz kudos that came with them. He was constantly on the phone reminding me to write a Viz TV show, as if it was something we could do in our lunch break.

In 1987 I met someone else who also had visions of Viz on TV. I'd never heard the name Harry Enfield until September of that year when the man himself rang me up and explained that he was a comedian and a big fan of Viz. He wondered if he could come up to Newcastle and meet me. He brought with him a producer friend called Andrew Fell and we went to Willow Teas for lunch. Harry was a big sniggerer - he laughed and chuckled a lot - but he was also smarmy. he'd studied politics at York University and seemed to be employing the tricks of that trade to further his career in entertainment. At one point he whispered that I should just ignore his friend Andrew as he'd only been invited along to pay for the train tickets and the lunch.

Harry said he was interested in doing a television equivalent of Viz, a sketch show based around lots of different characters. Would we be interested in helping to write it? As with Jonathan Ross, I nodded politely and said I'd think about it. Not long after that meeting Harry was on tour and performing at Newcastle Polytechnic along with the Scottish comedian and writer Craig Ferguson, who in those days was fat and went by the stage name of Bing Hitler. I'd never seen Harry perform, but from what he'd told me his act was made up of various characters, a bit like Viz. One of his jokes, about him being so sexy that a taxi he was travelling in exploded, had been lifted straight out of our Tony Knowles story in issue 11.

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: My Difficult 80s by Andrew Collins (Ebury Press 2004)

Ben Elton is my big favourite at the moment. He's my guiding light. My moral compass. He's mobilised all the instinctive humanitarian, left-wing feelings that have brewing up in me since leaving home and given voice to the way I feel deep down inside. I've never before been this laid bare with guilt - but good guilt, useful social guilt, practical guilt; not abstract, debilitating girlfriend -induced guilt about having a happy family or parking inconsiderately. In the space of just a few weekly stand-up routines in that crap suit, Ben has succeeded in making me feel guilty about a much broader range of stuff.

Ben Elton speaks directly to me, he speaks directly to all of us, from his pulpit on Saturday Live. I've never seen the halls coffee bar as packed as it is now is every Saturday night at ten. Standing room only. The committee don't bother hiring a video in any more and the poor old Prince Albert empties at 9.45. One week he's exposing the folly of trying to get a double seat on a train and speaking of the repressed British character, the next he's damning Benny Hill for chasing women round the park when in fact street lighting is inadequate and women are too scared to walk through parks. On occasions we've all found ourselves clapping the TV. Saturday Live makes me glad I'm back I'm back in the halls.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta (St Martins 2004)

And all at once, it came to Sarah: It was like being back at the Women's Center. For the first time since she graduated from college, she'd managed to find her way into a community of smart, independent, supportive women who enjoyed each other's company and didn't need to compete with one another or define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. It was precisely what she'd been missing, the oasis she'd been unable to find in graduate school, at work, or even at the playground. She'd searched for it for so long that she'd even come to suspect that it hadn't actually existed in the first place, at least not the way she remembered it, that it was more a product of her romantic undergraduate imagination than anything real in the world. But it had been real. It felt like this, and it was a huge relief to be back inside the circle again.