BOOK REVIEW: Tony Clayton-Leareviews How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil DiamondBy David Wild Old Street Publishing 203pp, £14.99
THERE IS a certain snobbery and smugness in rock music that is indicative of a superiority complex which dictates the lionising of one music act over the critical drubbing of another. Even the term "guilty pleasure" seems to have been coined in order to negate the supposed shame of admitting to liking bands that peer pressure says you shouldn't. It's as if you have to absolve yourself in the eyes of the hipper-than-thou for having the temerity to - even temporarily - switch your allegiance from, say, Pink Floyd to Clifford T Ward, or from Fight Like Apes to Beyonce.
Neil Diamond is one of the more significant examples of the kind of act loved by millions and sneered at by nowhere near as many. Rolling Stonecontributing editor David Wild certainly lays his cards on the table in what has to be one of the most obsequious, sycophantic books ever written about a major pop star.
From the outset, Wild makes it clear the thrust of the book isn't to reveal the inner workings of Diamond. But it's also clear as we go further into the slim narrative that whatever critical faculties Wild employed in the advancement of his career as a music critic and TV writer have been shunted to one side as he develops a pathological fixation with Diamond's music.
There is no objectivity here, either - merely a slavish and repetitive one-joke sequence of hagiography best exemplified in the opening chapter, "I'm a Believer": "The first time I ever enjoyed the semireligious experience of speaking with Neil Diamond at his former office on Melrose Place, I could not help but notice that the man whom I had been closely listening to my entire life displayed a charming, if unorthodox and vaguely pagan, tendency to bestow upon those individuals whom he greatly admired the honorary title of 'god'." Reading the book on the basis that it's more about Wild's consuming obsessions than Neil Diamond's innate creativity or intermittently superb music, one can only arrive at the conclusion that Wild has allowed the unthinkable to happen: he believes he is more interesting than his subject.
Hence, we read about Wild's family, his upbringing, his Bar Mitzvah and so on. Interspersed are snippets of what might have been intriguing insights into Diamond's creative processes and his life in general if they had been even peremptorily investigated: Diamond's first wife, Jay Posner, writes Wild, was "by all accounts . . . a lovely young lady from a good family".
Threads are left like whisper trails in the air, untouched or gathered by Wild for reasons one can only assume are connected with his ongoing professional and personal acquaintanceship with Diamond. But then, Wild is also the kind of guy who still owns the Diamond-composed soundtrack of Jonathan Livingston Seagullon eight-track and reel-to-reel tape - despite no longer having the equipment on which to play them.
"I had come to know Diamond's life better than he did," opines Wild in yet another bizarre flight of fancy. My God! There is obsessiveness and there is extreme obsessiveness.
• Tony Clayton-Lea writes on pop culture for The Irish Times. His most recent book, Rockaganda: Essential Irish Rock Quotes, was published by Collins Press earlier this year