The first half of Richard Coles’s blisteringly honest memoir follows the standard trajectory of the pop star autobiography, from mundane childhood (a boy “so sensitive... I made Marcel Proust look like Ian Botham”) to dizzying chart success. As keyboard player for The Communards, Coles soon lost himself in a welter of drugs, alcohol and recrimination. Behind this familiar story is something else though; a valuable exploration of a vanished world, when hard left politics met the gay rights movement in the shadow of Aids, and a lucid account of spiritual awakening. As St Augustine did in his Confessions, here Coles unflinchingly confronts his selfishness and self-disgust, and calmly outlines the “classic Protestant conversion” experience that saw him join the church and seek ordination. Bawdy, at times very moving, by the end of the book Coles has moved as far away from rock-star self-indulgence as you can get.
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