Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn: review Her written voice is similarly distinctive: warm, assertive, sweetly funny, but most of all honest. Hers is an unusual career that began with the band she formed with first one, then two, then three schoolfriends - the Marine Girls. They would go on to make one of the most purely wonderful records of the Eighties, Beach Party, conceived in a bedroom, recorded in a shed, and released on cassette. Its "heartfelt songs about boys we loved or despised" would become one of the very cornerstones of indie, later finding its way on to Kurt Cobain's list of Nirvana's 50 favourite albums. The incongruity of being fledgling pop stars, students and newly boyfriend and girlfriend throw up images that seem equally near and far from ordinary experience. The pair learn that Paul Weller wants to get in touch with them, and have to arrange a time to take the call in the phone box at the end of the road. And both are going through a youthful obsession with the Smiths, following them around the country. "I loved Morrissey," Thorn writes. I wanted to be him. Meanwhile, they're trying to get on with their degrees. There's a part of her, Thorn admits, that's always happier in the library than on a stage. She gets a First, and many years later can be seen fitting gigs and recording around writing a Master's thesis on Beckett's Trilogy. She's grounded, too, in the radical politics of the era, becoming part of the slightly queasy Red Wedge movement. An invitation to perform in Moscow turns out to be a dispiriting glimpse of the reality of life in the Soviet Union. Feminism proves a more lasting touchstone. Watt and Thorn's career, once it starts to take shape, after the hit single, Each and Every One, pupates into surprising forms. There's a flirtation with jazz and a rebirth into drum "n" bass. And there's a hilarious account of recording the album Language of Life in Manhattan with soul/jazz producer Tommy LiPuma and noted session musicians, where Thorn's suggestion that a sax solo needs "someone who plays like Stan Getz" leads straight to a phone call: "Stan, it's Tommy here..." Thorn is good at these left-of-frame snapshots of the personalities she's encountered, employing minor details to catch them in an often surprising light. Strangely, Watt remains somewhat elusive. There's a confession that the relationship has not always been plain sailing, a time of separate hotel rooms, and an account of the life-threatening illness that Watt survived and wrote about in Patient, but there's not even a hint of long-term division. The "baby years," when Thorn shunned the limelight to be at home with her children, are written about with something approaching surprise: "It seemed that what I wanted was to go to Gymboree and sing The Wheels on the Bus..." From the outside, though, it seems to fit. The "I want this so much" generation that fills X Factor auditions may owe much to Madonna's version of Eighties pop - "A shiny, brash, Teflon-coated embodiment of ambition," Thorn calls her - but there was another type of artist that grew out of that period - defiant, independent and untouched by "yuppies chugging champagne in City wine bars." This story captures one of them. Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn 378pp, Virago, t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £18.99, ebook £8.99)