Non-glitzy life spent on quieter tracks of rock

BOOK OF THE DAY: 21st Century TroubadourBy Andy White Lagan Press, 320pp, £9.99

FOR SOME bands, going on a world tour is a whirlwind of private jets, limos, plush hotels and a blizzard of class A drugs and champagne. For Andy White, going on a world tour is a wearisome round of red-eye flights, lonely train journeys and late-night bus trips, with only a disused circus caravan or a dilapidated room above the venue to rest your head. Forget rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous – White’s world is peopled by oddballs, misfits and stoners, each making a cameo appearance before disappearing forever into the narrative ether.

There’s not much glitz and glamour in White’s on-the-road journal, but there’s no shortage of surreal moments and bizarre situations, all documented with a wry, poetic eye.

Older rock fans will remember White – an affable alt.folkie from Belfast whose 1986 album, Rave On Andy White, is considered a classic of its time. He was also part of a folkie “supergroup” called Alt, with Liam Ó Maonlaí and Tim Finn from Crowded House. We haven’t heard much from White in the past few years, but that’s probably because he’s living in Australia and has spent most of the Noughties travelling the world with only his acoustic guitar and The Bag – a bulky yoke that sends airport security into apoplexy – for company.

21st Century Troubadourpaints a quietly impressionistic picture of a life spent roaming the backroads and byways of rock, far from the main drag of fame and stardom. Like a ghost who walks the earth, White flits from city to city, station to station, land mass to land mass, never tarrying long enough to assume corporeal form, and never meeting people for long enough to establish a solid connection. He's a continental drifter, materialising briefly on to a small stage before fading away again.

He may be doomed to tread far off the beaten track, but at least White writes about it with a nifty twist of the pen. He’s likely to find himself stuck without a change of shirt or enough cash to get back to the hotel, but he’s never stuck for a painterly description, a poetic observation or an apt literary reference. Even through the dullest, most torpid times in the tour, White can invoke the spirit of Jack Kerouac and keep his mind’s eye focused on more interesting things to come.

There are a few moments when White’s beaten path crosses with the glamorous high road. He gets mistaken for a member of U2 in a shoe store in Los Angeles, and learns that the best way to make people think you’re in U2 is to deny it. He meets a hippy in Alaska who turns out to be the auntie of Alaska’s most famous singer, Jewel. He chats in schoolboy French with actor James Nesbitt and gets a smile out of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith during a brief stage door encounter in Vancouver. Not exactly a star-studded celeb-packed roadshow, but there you go. White plainly isn’t plugged into the main artery, but moves instead through the more obscure veins of indiedom – and on these rarefied routes you’re not likely to run into too many superstars.

There's a subtext to this seemingly aimless odyssey around the world and across a decade. It's one man's search for his home, both spiritual and physical. But it could also be subtitled Nowhere Man.

The Belfast singer keenly feels the sting of exile as he moves through the half light on his way to his next nebulous destination. There’s a danger, though, that the reader will be worn down by White’s endless trudge in search of himself, and may jump off this globe-straddling treadmill at the next stop.

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist