‘One for the heads’ is the phrase that traditionally covers the more outré elements of a band’s career: the outtakes, the triple live album or the B-sides collection designed to appeal to those who have already wrung every drop of pleasure from the main catalogue. The expression also covers a genre of music writing that Nige Tassell is increasingly making his own.

In his previous music book, Searching for Dexys Midnight Runners (2024), Tassell set out to interview every musician who had ever been part of that band, however briefly or tendentiously. It wasn’t a unique approach. Back in 2008, Dave Simpson’s The Fallen attempted the even larger project of tracking down everyone who had ever been in the Fall, up to and including the stand-in drummer who played one 45-minute set with them in the John Peel tent at the 1999 Reading Festival. (Step forward Nick Dewey.) Tassell’s Dexys book wasn’t without its pluses, but its main flaw (and to be fair, one the author made no secret of) was that the key player in the story – Dexys main man Kevin Rowlands – was absent. What you inevitably ended up with was a sense of Hamlet without the Prince. And so it goes with Truly Gifted Kids, written without the cooperation of........

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