This frontman of a Glaswegian sci-fi punk-rock band is turning the rock star memoir on its head

For decades countless sex’n’drugs’n’booze-sodden memoirs have storied the rises and falls of noteworthy musicians – successful, influential, or somewhere in between. Those books represent only the tip of the iceberg of the music business: people who have, in one way or another, “made it”. Not the far more numerous musicians who slogged it out in tour vans and crummy venues for years, without ever capturing the public’s imagination. 

These complete unknowns’ stories have never really been meaningfully represented in a book before as far as I’m aware. Until now.  

You’re Doing It Wrong: My Life as a Failed International Rock Star is the memoir of Michael M. From 2005 to 2013, he led Glasgow sci-fi punk-rock four piece We Are the Physics on their righteous path to resolutely not making it. “Who the hell is that and why should I care?” you may reasonably ask. And that’s sort of the point.  

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“I’ve read a lot of biographies of bands,” says Michael M (no surname, just M), “but they’re generally, of course, by people you’d know. Because why would you buy that book otherwise? But there are thousands of people who have lived a life of touring, who were ‘professional’ musicians. They were doing it for months, years, living a life that’s kind of adjacent to what the start of those books are generally about – spending years in a van.  

“But whereas they eventually make it,” he continues, “most of us don’t. Most of us spend time doing that, and then just have to get a real job. Because you can’t afford to do it any more, or because the industry loses faith in you, or whatever. But I don’t think that invalidates their stories.” 

Cameron’s Crowe’s touching rock’n’roll coming-of-age memoir Almost Famous this is not. It’s not even Almost Almost Famous. It’s the story of a band which, in the book’s first chapter, the author describes as being so historically insignificant that they were “forgotten to be forgotten”. 

We Are the Physics had spiky catchy songs and a hysterically entertaining live show. They were signed to a major label, hailed by NME as “the most perfect new band ever”, and given slots on huge festival stages. And yet, through a combination of bad decisions, bad luck, self-doubt and a steadfastly unserious attitude, they messed it all up. 

In You’re Doing It Wrong, the destination (“disappointment” as Michael M bluntly puts it) proves much less important than the journey. From getting lost in Tokyo to kicking beer over neo-Nazis in Russia and every toilet venue in between, it’s a book about the mundanities, absurdities and indignities of tour life in its most fundamental form – as well as the characters they encountered along the way, including a promoter so high on cocaine he ate a book in front of their disbelieving eyes.  

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For anyone who has ever been in or around bands, it will ring hilariously true. Even if you haven’t, you’ll find it funny anyway. Because when it comes to being funny, if not being a renowned rock star, Michael M definitely has form. If you’ve looked at the internet any time in the last decade, there’s a strong possibility that Michael M has made you laugh like a drain. His talent as a creator of side-splittingly weird viral content is surpassed only by his talent for avoiding credit for it. “I want to make stuff, but I don’t particularly want people to look at me,” he explains, revealing another good reason he never made it as a rock star. 

Ever seen slug solos, for instance? Those consummately photoshopped images that do the rounds on social media sometimes, of guitar gods from Slash to Carlos Santana, their faces orgasmically contorted in the throes of a powerful shred, clutching giant slimy molluscs in place of their instruments? Before they were re-shared a gazillion times by grifters claiming to be their originator, Michael M made them.  

Or how about the absurdist YouTube classic that is Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody, re-recorded so that it’s just the opening lyric “are you hanging up your stocking on your wall?” Michael M made that too. Chart-topper and friend of Big Issue Sam Fender loves it so much he’s been filmed belting it out in his local pub, and Slade’s Noddy Holder is known to have heard it and pissed himself laughing too. 

Michael M has made piles of other viral content, some of it too copyright-infringing to mention here. For his troubles, he’s seen “not one penny”, he admits. And he’s surprisingly fine with that. “I don’t expect any money for it,” he says, “I do it for the making.” 

Which is basically the story of You’re Doing It Wrong, too.  

It’s also a book about shame, and imposter syndrome, and the peculiar psychological aversion that a working-class boy from Glasgow’s rough east end can have to becoming a somebody. Because he wasn’t raised that way.  

Amid all the laughs, Michael M suddenly ambushes readers with a chapter about his late father. A troubled, brooding figure, the closest he ever came to connecting with his son’s burgeoning music career was swinging a guitar at his head. It’s one of the most disarmingly moving evocations of the darkness that stalks a generation of west coast Scottish manhood that I’ve read. It makes me believe there’s more great writing from Michael M to come. 

“A lot of the book, including the shame elements,” he reflects, “including the relationships with my family, are about growing up as a working-class Glaswegian, and trying to figure out why you’ve got imposter syndrome. These are things that through the process of writing, I’ve discovered about myself and understood. It was kind of like therapy. I’m more at peace with who I am, and who I was, as a result.” 

You’re Doing It Wrong: My Life as a Failed International Rock Star by Michael M is out now (£7)

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