This substantial but consistently entertaining book is subtitled Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola: The AOR Glory Years 1976-1986, which tells you rather more about it than its somewhat dull and misleading title. It’s an oral history, narrated by the participants, of probably the most critically savaged era of pop music: the heyday of AOR, album-oriented rock in plain English, and all those (mainly American) bands we all loved to hate: Styx, Journey, Survivor, REO Speedwagon, Asia, Boston and, of course, Foreigner. 

Members of the band Foreigner 

Their songs still pop up on radio, and in the pub at the top of my road. You may wish to forget Babe by Styx or, worst of all, Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor, but they will never let you, and long after you have lost all your teeth and most of your marbles, you will still remember Jump by Van Halen, possibly more clearly than the names of your children.

Writer Paul Rees has not actually interviewed many of these musicians himself, but he has read all the books and the magazine articles about them and taken note of what they said. The vast majority are engaged on nostalgic live tours of the world, playing all their old hits for audiences equally stricken with age.

No young people like this music, which suggests there is hope for the future after all.

The various musicians talk of the usual nitty gritty of the rock process: drugs, drink, groupies and more drugs. If you love pop music as much as I do, you’ll find it all fascinating.

Pop musicians, as we all know, are just like the rest of us, except even sillier. Too many think they are by far the most important person in their band; most are wrong.

One of my favourites of these groups were Foreigner, so-called because three of them were British, three were American, so wherever they were in the world, at least three of them would be foreign.

But this music has legs. Take Journey’s hit Don’t Stop Believin’. Recorded in one take in 1981, it was featured in the last episode of The Sopranos in 2007 and rerecorded by the cast of Glee in 2009. By 2012 it was the most streamed song, by anyone, from the 20th century.

In the UK it’s gone seven-times platinum and it reached No 6 in the singles chart in 2010, just 29 years after its original release. And it’s still godawful. Unlike this book, which is splendid.