The memoirs of a wizened rock god turned out to be one of the publishing sensations of the year. Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) by Keith Richards with James Fox is a startlingly candid account of one man's largely successful attempt to indulge in hitherto unimagined extremes of narcotic excess while somehow holding down a job in the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world. With such a fund of dramatic material at his disposal, Richards does not disappoint in the telling of his tale. Run-ins with law enforcement agencies on the one hand, and drug dealers on the other, are described with a nonchalant swagger. Unexplained car crashes, mysterious fires in hotels and houses, lurid sexual betrayals, fights, shootings and deaths occur against a rolling backdrop of epic drink and drug binges. There is also a lot of serious consideration given over to the subject of music  everything from fascinating insights into the songwriting process that produced so many monumental hits to more specialised explanations of the minutiae of open-tuning guitar techniques.

Lucid and unusually well researched for this kind of book, Life is a compelling read on every level. It is also revealing in unintended ways. Richards is nothing if not comfortable in his own skin, and the way in which he blithely recounts so many troubling, even macabre episodes, as if they were simple mishaps that occurred through no real fault of his own, becomes faintly jarring after a while. Sleeping with a loaded gun under his pillow? Threatening a taxi driver with a knife? Turning up blind drunk to meet his prospective in-laws for the first time and smashing a guitar on their dinner table? Hey, that's Life.

The latter part of the memoir is driven to an unhealthy degree by his antipathy towards Mick Jagger, his songwriting partner of almost 50 years. Richards accuses Jagger of vanity and disloyalty, while in the same pages recounting how he bedded Jagger's girlfriend Marianne Faithfull under the singer's nose and casting withering aspersions on his manhood. Jagger is no saint. But you end up feeling that he must be blessed with unusual reserves of stoicism to have put up with Richards's outrageously self-absorbed behaviour and incessant needling over such a long period of time.

While Richards survived the upheavals of the 1960s with most of his marbles intact, others were less fortunate. Syd Barrett, the original singer, guitarist and songwriter of Pink Floyd, was a talented and charismatic man who suffered a disastrous reaction to having his life rearranged by fame and hallucinogenic drugs. "He was such a nice guy that I felt really sorry when he got mixed up with rock music," one of Barrett's contemporaries from art school remarked. Rob Chapman's biography, Syd Barrett  A Very Irregular Head (Faber, £14.99), borders on the pretentious at times; in one piece of film footage, Barrett can apparently be seen "constantly challenging the gestural lexicon of the rock guitar". But Chapman's scholarly appreciation of Barrett's peculiar musical genius lends authority to this sympathetic account of the reluctant star's decline into befuddled inertia  and throws valuable light on one of the more disturbing stories in rock lore.

A different kind of psychosis stalks the pages of The Life of Karen Carpenter  Little Girl Blue (Omnibus, £19.95) by Randy L Schmidt. Although hits such as "Yesterday Once More" and "We've Only Just Begun" were, as the New York Times put it, "musical white bread for sure", the story of the woman who sang them is narrative red meat. Initially a skilled drummer, then a singer whose perfect tone remains the benchmark against which new acts are still measured, Karen Carpenter died in 1983, at the age of 32, from heart failure brought on by anorexia nervosa. Unlike previous accounts, Schmidt's book was not authorised by the Carpenter family, which appears to have liberated both the author and those who witnessed events to give the first truly convincing account of her nightmarish story.

Few authors delve as deeply into the dark heart of the creative process as John "Drumbo" French has done in Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic (Proper Music Publishing, £19.95), an unsettling exposé of his life as the drummer and musical director of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. Although the book would have benefited from more rigorous editing, its 860 pages combine meticulous musical and historical detail with harrowing revelations about the cruel and manipulative working practices of Beefheart, who behaved more like the leader of a religious cult than an avant-garde rock band.

Nick Kent's Apathy For The Devil  A 1970s Memoir (Faber, £12.99) remains the best-written rock book of the year and provides a salutary warning of what happens when a rock journalist is seduced into trying to maintain the Keith Richards lifestyle without having the financial wherewithal or necessary support system in place. The drugs and near-death experiences were a high price to pay for the insights he gained into the world of music and musicians. But Kent did it all so that the rest of us, thankfully, don't have to, and he deserves respect at this juncture, no matter how foolish his youthful mistakes.

Amid so many bleak tales, it is something of a relief to find David Bowie's early career laid out in a riot of colourful but forensic detail in Any Day Now  The London Years: 1947-1974 (Adelita, £24.99) by Kevin Cann. An illustrated record of Bowie's long and giddy rise to stardom, it is a goldmine of information peppered with quotes from those around him at the time. "I've always thought David was very nice and easy to get on with," said the late studio engineer Gus Dudgeon. Finally, then, a little goodwill to spread around the tree.

David Sinclair's Spice Girls Revisited is published by Omnibus. To order any of these titles with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.

The survivor's story is one of the predominant narratives of our time. It usually traces a familiar arc from excess through despair to redemption, and, as such, allows us to enjoy the vicarious thrill of voyeurism within the framework of a cautionary or salutary tale. Life by Keith Richards, the most famous survivor of them all, breaks with this tradition insofar as it contains excess aplenty but hardly any despair and very little redemption. Keith did it all, had a hell of a good time, and survived to brag about it.

Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general  and the Rolling Stones in particular  once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always "chicks" or "bitches", an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory.

It is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre. Instead, it is almost casual in its cataloguing of excess: heroin, cocaine, Tuinal, Nembutal, STP, LSD, speedballs, Moroccan hashish, Jamaican ganja, and, inevitably, methadone, are just some of the substances mentioned  often in passing. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the book, which describes his daily breakfast routine during the 70s: "I would take a barbiturate to wake up  a Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you're feeling mellow, you've had a bit of breakfast and you're ready for work."

The word "mellow" here is, of course, relative. This is someone, after all, who took downers to wake up and start the day  albeit slowly. While reading Life, it is worth keeping in mind that mellow for Keith means comatose for the rest of us. Even John Lennon, no stranger to excess, tried and failed miserably to keep up with Keef, ending up, as the latter puts it, "in my john, hugging the porcelain".

Keeping up with Keef became a deadly game in the early 1970s, when heroin  usually mixed with cocaine and injected as a "speedball"  became Richards and his partner, Anita Pallenberg's, drug of choice.

Pallenberg, alone, seems to have kept up with Keef by being both more ruthless and more reckless. She was originally the girlfriend of Brian Jones about whose death Richards is cold-blooded. Jones, a desolate individual, temperamentally unsuited to fame, drowned in his swimming pool in July 1969, a few weeks after being fired by Jagger and Richards. He is described here as a "whining son of a bitch" whose death occurred "at that point in his life when there wasn't any".

Richards is cavalier about death  his own and others'  seeing it as a kind of occupational hazard best avoided by "pacing yourself". This from a man who scored cocaine and heroin by the pound. It was, he insists, the very best heroin and the purest cocaine, which undoubtedly helped, as did the array of top-class lawyers who were on call every time he ran foul of the law.

The main problem with Life, though, is that too many of these tales have been told before, most evocatively in two classic on-the-road-with-the-Stones chronicles: Stanley Booth's The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones and Robert Greenfield's Stones Touring Party. For me, the writing comes alive when Richards broaches the subject of the great music he once made and the heroes that inspired him to do so.

He is surprisingly illuminating on chord structures and the like, the kind of thing that in most rock memoirs has me skipping pages to get to the next drug bust or wrecked hotel room. He brilliantly summons up the suffocating drabness of postwar English suburbia and the cathartic effect of hearing raw blues and rock'n'roll on imported albums. With Jones and Mick Jagger, he listened to those records over and over, then tried to replicate their sound with the fierce dedication of the true religious devotee. "It was a mania. Benedictines had nothing on us. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter  Every moment taken away from it was a sin."

From time to time, you sense that Richards loved his guitars even more than he loved his "chicks". He sometimes writes about the lure of the Gibson and the Fender with undisguised eroticism. In this, he is the polar opposite of his musical partner, Jagger, with whom he maintains what might in therapy-speak be called a long-term dysfunctional relationship. He has not, he confesses, visited Jagger's dressing room in 20 years.

For Richards, one senses, old wounds are slow to heal. One of the most extraordinary passages in Life describes the writing of "Gimme Shelter" in 1969. It is perhaps the Stones' darkest, most apocalyptic song, but it was spawned, not by the spiralling political turbulence of the times, but Richards's intuition  correct as it turned out  that Jagger was bedding Pallenberg on the set of Donald Cammell's film, Performance.

Richards's relationship with Jagger, though, has outlasted every other relationship either of them has ever had. Neither Richards's heroin addiction nor Jagger's dalliance with the dreadful Studio 54 disco crowd could undo it. The Rolling Stones, too, survive and thrive in ways that it would have been impossible for either of them to have imagined. Now pensioners, they peddle an astoundingly successful global brand of sponsored rock nostalgia  their last tour was the highest-grossing ever. The group's career path perfectly traces the trajectory of the rock form from rebellion, to assimilation by the mainstream, to corporatism; from meaning to empty spectacle.

Nevertheless, Keith Richards, now a tax exile and a granddad, remains fixed in the public consciousness as a rock'n'roll outlaw. "People love that image," he muses. "They imagined me, they made me  Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfil their needs. They're wishing me to do things that they can't. They've got to do this job, they've got this life, they're an insurance salesman  but, inside them, there's a raging Keith Richards." That Keith has not raged, nor indeed written a great song, in three decades, hardly matters: he's still here to tell the tale.