The first – Schoenberg and Stravinsky for example – had well-documented public lives whose vicissitudes clearly interact with their

The first – Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for example – had well-documented public lives whose vicissitudes clearly interact with their artistic development. They themselves reflect upon this interaction in their own writings, aware of their status as icons for a certain vision of what it meant to be a composer at a given moment in history. Even rejecting this extreme position, there are two very different categories of potential subject. But the biographer faces a challenge to which the novelist is largely immune: the need to address the preliminary question “Why bother?” Arguably, if the work needs commentary or validation from the life, it is by definition second-rate; if it doesn’t, then such extraneous detail is at best of academic interest and at worst caters to a vulgar desire to have Wolfgang and Constanze invite us retrospectively into their lovely apartment in Vienna’s fashionable Schulerstrasse.

IT has become a cliche to regard biography as a surrogate form of the 19th-century novel, offering a hearty meat-and-two-veg rich in human interest and “characters you can identify with” to readers increasingly fed up with a diet of fat-free, low-sodium fiction If the Booker Prize list looks thin, get a Life. Put the kettle on and throw the cat out of the window, the summer nights are drawing in Ben ThompsonJoy Division: Permanent (London, CD/LP/tape). Solemn phosphorescence: ideal for the idle thrill-seeker as well as the lonely and lost BTCharlie Haden and Hank Jones: Steal Away (Verve, CD). Wholly delightful bass and piano reworkings of spirituals, protest songs and campfire favourites Phil Johnson. THE PARCHED Southern voice manages not to betray a smile as it sings “A chip on the shoulder usually means there is wood up above”. Welcome to the warped and winsome world of Georgia songwriter Vic Chesnutt, where words dance like puppets on nylon guitar-strings and every harmony embraces an aphorism. He might have a name better suited to a children’s entertainer, but Chesnutt’s songs are made of adult stuff.

Suicide, loneliness and various shades of individual inadequacy are his stock-in-trade. But even his darkest moments are lit with mordant wit: he is the opposite of those singer-songwriters whose attempts to lay bare their emotions make you wish they’d put on a bathrobe. The two facts which everyone who knows anything about Chesnutt is already in possession of are that he is a friend of REM’s Michael Stipe and that he gets about in a wheelchair, having broken his neck in a drunken car- smash at the age of 18 Both tend to give a misleading impression. A Stipe recommendation is the US equivalent of the glad-hand from Morrissey – a kiss of instant career-death. And the knowledge that Chesnutt developed his distinctive guitar style by playing with a pick superglued to a plaster cast suggests that his career is a straightforward saga of nobility against the odds.
Impish charmer that he is, Chesnutt would probably be the first to admit that he actually has a self-destructive streak as wide as the Mississippi, and often seems engaged in a heroic struggle to make life even more difficult for himself than it already is And that’s just on his good nights. At his first London appearance, supporting Kristin Hersh early last year, he was so drunk he nearly rolled off the stage. I meet him in the midst of what he ruefully describes as an “era of sobriety”, a hangover from a mishap referred to on the sleeve of his fine current album Is the Actor Happy? (Texas Hotel) as “The Zurich Incident”, wherein he overdosed in that chilly Swiss city – “I burnt away a whole big evil section of my brain” – and was in a coma for a week.The delight he takes in everyday language – in conversation as well as absurd lyrical snippets like “even her freakish nipples were akimbo” – is such that it is initially hard to understand how this man could ever get that low.

As the photographer leaves, Chesnutt says “Cheers”, picking up an English affectation into which his interviewer had inadvertently lapsed a few minutes earlier, and breaks into a demonic cackle. What’s wrong with “cheers”? “I like it, but it just sounds stupid coming out of my mouth.” The same sense of manifest enjoyment prevails in the precision of his writing – “Betty Lonely lives in a duplex of stucco .. Betty Lonely, she will always think in Spanish”. Maybe you need to get depressed to get this much joy out of words.Despite their clarity of expression, Chesnutt’s songs seem to inspire a different response in everyone who hears them. “Sometimes people say what they think I mean and it’s a hundred times better than what I actually meant,” he smiles.