Tim Rogers wrote a book. I read it.

Tim Rogers
Detours
(HarperCollins)

Tallying it up, I’ve probably had a dozen-or-so conversations with Tim Rogers. These have ranged from the formal interview in the nice hotel to plug the major label record the band’s heart wasn’t really in, to a chance encounter when I noticed that identifiable artfully dishevelled ‘D-list celebrity’ (his default self-deprecating self-description…) in the checkout queue at the local IGA, after a morning TV appearance where he'd ended up calling Sonia Kruger a racist in the green room after.

Then there was the couple of beers and couple of hours with him and The Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner ostensibly to plug their joint tour. It was a terrific chat, ranging over a myriad of subjects – musical and non-musical – which if I’d used much of it, the lawyers may well still be working out the libel damages. Despite some of it, my artistic and otherwise crush on Megan Washington remains, and Mr Faulkner now knows the "...difference between Hunters & Collectors and a moose..." joke.

He probably doesn’t remember - and I’m trying to forget - an afternoon in the courtyard (it was more the back alley…) beside the pre-gentrified Annandale Hotel, where various griefs and an unfortunate attempt at self-medication by pharmaceutical and alcoholic means had me weeping in his arms. I’m hugely embarrassed by that, but at various points through Detours you find that likely wouldn’t be the first or last time that kind of thing happened: the book shows a repeated empathetic need to be comforting, sometimes to the point of over-caring, as one of his recurring character points. For him there always seems a need for contact, a human touch. Any meeting with him always seems to come with  a warm handshake, an awkward man-hug, a clasp on the shoulder as he leaves. It’s kind of old-fashioned, and quite endearing.

But those glancing contacts and foreknowledge maybe let me slip into the book a little easier than some. Detours is absolutely his voice. One moment somewhere between Oscar Wilde and some faded English theatrical luvvie waiting for the knighthood to come through in the next Queen’s honours list, or the one after. The next, he’s the Kalgoorlie footy umpire’s son decrying the ‘$10 pint!’ at another pub where the tiles have been replaced by blonde wood, chrome, and distressed train station signs of the current fashion. Then, with utter candour, he’s the distant dad beating himself up and anxious about the daughter he unashamedly adores. Throw in the bravado – which is obviously sometimes a defence mechanism – where he’s ‘Tim Fucking Rogers, rock star!’ again, although leavening that with memories of waking in shit-stained and/or vomit-flecked hotel beds, and at one point the almost throwaway admission that ‘Meth really isn’t a good idea…’ Gee, ya reckon?

That’s another of his habits. It’s not a deliberate trick or affectation, but a Tim Rogers conversation can be elliptical. It happens all through the book. Dropped mentions of his parents’ apparently still wounded slow-motion breakup get further details five chapters on, and have you circling back the pages to put the fragments together. I play the recording of that back-bar conversation with he and Faulkner, and it’s there too: he expresses an unspecified worry about the now-teenage daughter almost as an aside - but as you try to find the moment to ask if things are alright with her, you’ve already gone onto other subjects: meeting Noel Gallagher, to reading list tips (yes, George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo is that good…), the history of the Stetson hat, the b-side of Question Mark & The Mysterians’ 96 Tears, and ‘…should we have another drink?’ (Answer: Probably not, but you do….)

Similarly, subjects jumps from chapter to chapter sometimes seem like almost manic-depressive mood swings. But at some places, one will build on another. The minutiae of constructing the daughter’s first birthday party since he and the wife separated is his well-documented anxiety problems dripped onto a page. The picking of those scabs interrupted by the ex’s second guessing of everything including the corn chips menu coming like nailbombs thrown on what’s already a dumpster fire. A couple of pages later, a still acne-scarred young Timmy is expressing his hero worship for an early mentor, Box The Jesuit’s Goose. The Sydney cult-figure’s declining health and increasing frailty recalled with a young man’s regret of finding your heroes are mortal. It’s genuinely heartbreaking. Get through that, and Tim’s back in his natural environment, on a stage in Canada, although it’s a fairly desultory gig for a tour-weary band. That Rogers then matter-of-factly recalls walking offstage and quite deliberately tears open his forearm with a broken beer bottle hits you just like one of those Lionel Rose uppercuts he celebrated in song. The reader is horrified, but somehow not shocked.

You might have gathered this is not the typical ‘hookers-&-blow’ rock guy autobiography. Although the latter is certainly present. If anything, "The band that kept me alive..." You Am I are almost peripheral players – although there is obvious affection for drummer Rusty Hopkinson’s encyclopaedic and sometimes esoteric enthusiasm and knowledge for all sorts of music, and Rogers’ evolved relationship with ‘young’ Davey Lane. The ‘second guitarist’ having gone from raw kid in an almost sensei/apprentice arrangement, to Uncle Tim now looking at the junior member as a quite extraordinary musician and human in his own right. They’re a family, with an absolute caring often expressed as just an offhand ‘...You OK, mate?’ aside in the fine Australian manner. But in the context of the book, the band that made his name and ‘saved his life’ are equal billed with a knockabout Aussie Rules teams of middle-aged blokes that kick around a sometimes waterlogged ball, and almost accidentally sometimes solve one another’s problems; and she who is known as The Hurricane: an extraordinary, mercurial, gloriously big personality who can handle his with as much wit, style, and sheer bloody-mindedness as he can conjure. He may have met his match. Based on the loving portrait of her painted in this, I just want to buy her a bottle of bloody good Shiraz, genuflect, and kiss her hand.

Tim Rogers is an expansively flawed character. You might have known that. He does. He’s absolutely blunt about it in what is hopefully only his first literary tome. I don’t think he’s after our forgiveness, but he’ll take your understanding.