I saw session bassist extraordinaire turned stand up comedian Guy Pratt perform extracts from this book at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2007. As a raconteur, he did a decent job, so I had high hopes for the audiobook version I listened to, which he narrated.

Unfortunately, what proved to be amusing over the course of an hour or so proved to be pretty wearing for nearly nine. Pratt has played for a variety of artists from Madonna and Michael Jackson through David Coverdale & Jimmy Page to Australian Roxy Music impersonators Icehouse, but most famously for Pink Floyd, for whom he played Roger Waters' bass parts once he'd departed from the band.

My Bass and Other Animals mainly consists of tales of tour hi-jinks, largely involving what he got up to following the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and often stronger substances, mixed with pen portraits of the various stars he's played with, most of which conform to the perceptions one already has of them: Madonna is domineering, Michael Jackson shy and eccentric due to a botched nose job etc. With a band like Pink Floyd, where the music was always larger than the people who made it, David Gilmour and cohorts simply come across as your average multi-millionaires.

This is a laddish, larky reminiscence about an over-indulgent 1980s and '90s. Fun, but probably best consumed in small doses. ( )