Stoned Andrew Loog Oldham Secker & Warburg, 374pp, £16.99 ISBN 0436288664

Stoned is as much a record of an era as an autobiography. The book focuses more on the people, music, events, trends, fashion and business of the Sixties than Oldham's interior life (perhaps a result of Oldham's lack of emotional connection after taking so many drugs). For such a rabid egomaniac, there is something oddly objective about his memoirs.

Part of the book's appeal is that it defies expectations of the music-business hustler and manager of the Rolling Stones. It also debunks the myths of the Sixties and "swinging" London: "In fact, the Chelsea set were really a gang of layabouts who pissed away time in pubs on the King's Road." The era that emerges is one of postwar austerity, rationing and convention. It was a time - before the contraceptive pill and the sexual revolution, before Harold Macmillan told us that we'd never had it so good - when girls were more likely to wear twinsets than miniskirts. Rock 'n' roll "was just one more teenage fad that would quickly pass", and a young Cliff Richard was castigated in NME: "His violent hip-swinging was revolting, hardly the kind of performance any parent would wish their children to see. He was wearing so much eyeliner he looked like Jayne Mansfield."

Against this rather dreary backdrop, Oldham's greed, drive and dedication to fashion seem understandable, if not exactly laudable. Educated at both state and public schools, raised by a single mother and funded by her wealthy lover, Oldham was an outsider who looked for the possibility of redemption and self-reinvention in the glamour of wealth and show business.

Inspired by the film Room at the Top and, in particular, by Laurence Harvey ("the actor who would tower in my imagination as a paragon of accomplishment and style"), Oldham describes himself in a dissociated way, as if he were indeed a character in a film. His obsession with image, which sometimes recalls the listing of style and accessories in American Psycho, certainly helped his career. Spurred by a furious ambition, later combined with drugs, Oldham's rise was so rapid that, when he signed up the Rolling Stones, he was still a teenager and had to get his mother to co-sign the contracts with Decca.

Oldham's prose style, as befits his subject matter, owes a lot more to music journalism than to literature, which can be both irritating and amusing. His narrative is sprinkled with song lyrics and titles: Charlie Watts was "kinda blue"; Mick Jagger "seconded that emotion"; Oldham forgot that "he who is not busy being born is busy dying". His writing is fast-paced, erratic, flash, colourful and empty of feeling - a bit like cocaine.

Interviews with his contemporaries describe Oldham as a vain, drugged, mother-beating, insecure and selfish bully, and he does little to defend himself. But they also make clear the contribution that he made to the music industry, in his short time at the top, by wrestling control away from the suited record companies and putting it into the hands of the artists.

Although he is not self-pitying enough to say so, he became a victim of his own success. By the time the Stones wanted to be rid of him, they had the power to do so; but that story comes later than the period covered by this book and will doubtless appear in the next volume charting his fall from grace - More Stones, perhaps?

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