BOOK REVIEW: DETOURS by Tim Rogers

BOOK REVIEW: DETOURS by Tim Rogers
Harper Collins – Hardcover rrp$35.00
1st September, 2017
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
9 ½ /10

Detours, Tim Rogers’ debut book, is a memoir of the You Am I frontman’s storied life, but not a biography, per se.

More than a mere hagiography, Detours reads like a collection of self-deprecating essays more than anything else – take off the dust jacket and imprinted in the hard front cover is the legend “you gotta have stories.” Boy, oh boy – does Rogers ever have stories!

Meandering through seemingly random recollections, Rogers adopts a perfectly languid and literary pace, and a fittingly lyrical turn of prose.

In telling these tales of teenage OCD disorders and acne-scarred embarrassment, gigs in front of thousands, or mere handfuls, meeting The Hurricane – the love of his recent life, boozy tales of foolish rock n’ roll adventure and tender stories of fatherly love, Rogers is a bar stool raconteur, sharing more of himself – the man, the muso, the barroom crawler, the lover, the fighter, the bandmate, the son – than any traditional biography could hope to do.

At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, Rogers makes us think these stories are random detours, but as the book progresses we start to see the bigger picture – much like an Impressionist painting, where each blob of paint seems independent up close, but the whole becomes obvious once we take a few steps backwards.

Essential.

Category: Book Reviews