Endearing, charming, honest and absorbing, Detours is the most anticipated literary and rock n' roll memoir of the year - it is witty, endearing, funny, sad, truthful tender and beautiful - think Patti Smith meet Dylan Thomas, via Banjo Paterson.
Tim Rogers - the front man and singer of hugely popular rock n'roll band You Am I - is a shambolic, flamboyant and dapper Aussie flâneur - a seeker after truth, love and understanding. He's a contradiction: a hard drinking rock star with the soul of a poet; a wordsmith and a raconteur, a romantic and a realist, a bon vivant op-shop-dressed dandy. He's the wild man of Australian rock n' roll, a man who loves footy, who was brought up in the wild emptiness of Kalgoorlie, but he's now an urban hipster - a legend of Australian rock music, more at home in St Kilda than the bush.
In this offbeat and immensely charming literary memoir, Tim Rogers talks about what it is to be a man, about accepting who you are, about masculinity, love, sex, drinking, footy, his father, being a dad, anxiety, and above all, his continuing, magical, ever-present muse - music. It is by turns revealing, warm, self-deprecating, intimate, shocking, confessional, sharp, funny and immensely engaging.
Review by Ben Hunter
Detours is a gem of a book and here's why you should read it. Detours is not a celebrity memoir. It has no ghostwriter, no laboured famous-name-droppings or manufactured moments of epiphany or scandal. It doesn't have that glossy photo-paper bit in the middle for in case you get bored of actually reading the thing. Detours is a beautiful hardcover book rich in exacting observation and not-tortuously-whimsical reminiscence.
This book offers a marvellous reflection on Tim's great passions - AFL, rock 'n' roll and Melbourne. Now I'm afraid to say that I've never kicked a Sherrin, blown an amp or had a number plate that declares itself the place to be but still I'm hooked on this stuff. I feel at home in Tim's writing. He leaves the bravado behind and takes you on long walks through his life on and off the stage.
Detours is a book that lets you see through the eyes of a towering broken-nosed greyhair - a guy who passes through violent suburbs in velvet lapels and silk scarves, who checks the ceiling of every hotel room he stays in for stray slices of pizza, and who armours himself with slabs of beer and bares his soul to strangers. Detours is an Aussie treasure, the neatly-polished self portrait of a dandy drunkard wordsmith. Pick it up and you'll see what I mean.
