Sunday – A nice rainy day, so time to get out and about. I saunter off to Barnes for walk with Ms Nina Antonia. She is the author of books about parent-baiting androgynous rockers from the 1970s: the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and most recently the doomed teenage star-that-never-was, Brett Smiley, in “The Prettiest Star – Whatever Happened To Brett Smiley?’ This week she will appear on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour talking about this latest and I think most accessible work. You don’t have to know about Brett Smiley to enjoy it, because it’s about why Brett Smiley isn’t famous in the first place. It’s a more universal tale of thwarted and frustrated dreams, and of a pop fan’s own teenage dreams (of escape, of self-realisation) projected upon hubris-tainted pin-ups.

It’s also about what I consider to be historically essential to pop music – the reaching out of the Deliberate Weirdo to fragile teenagers’ Inner Weirdo everywhere. The appearance on mass family TV of an exotically androgynous performer, confusing and scaring the parents while enticing those who never realised they were of a different stripe. It’s the most redeemable moment in the film “Velvet Goldmine”, where suburban teenager Christian Bale sits in front of the TV and points at a Bowie-esque pop star on the screen. He gasps, watches, then shouts back to his appalled mother and father on the sofa, “That – That’s ME, that is! That’s ME!”

I wonder now if that same cry manifested itself in living rooms last week, when Antony and The Johnsons won the Mercury Prize. The Importance Of Being Publicly Weird can never be underestimated or indeed under-promoted. The Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park, and their New-Britpop kind are all very well, but when Antony & The Johnsons appeared, I imagined a million “What the hell is – THAT?” expressions on more than a few sofas. Elsewhere, tender and solitary hearts fluttered with the relief of a new connection, a new projection, a new representative.

All pop music should never just be about pop music. Because it never used to be. A while ago there was always at least one artist comforting those that felt they were the only unusual ones in the world. There’s not been enough of that lately. So hats off to the Mercury judges.

Thinking back to Mr Smiley’s musical failure, I feel Ms Antonia’s book is released from the pitfalls of a genuinely successful artist’s biography, where the readership is limited to a book-buying subset of the subject’s fans. I don’t care how beautifully-written a Coldplay biography might be; even if Harper Lee were to suddenly emerge from her sequestered world to pen it, I would never consider a life lived without an Exclusive Coldplay Interview to be a life unfulfilled. Chris Heath’s study of Robbie Williams, “Feel”, might be a rare exception, critically acclaimed thanks to Mr Heath’s eminently readable fly-on-the-wall style. But even so, I had to put it down after a smattering of pages, because I just don’t want to spend time lurking around Robbie Williams. He’s not unusual enough – even though he thinks he is.

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In Barnes we pass a car showroom that specialises in those zeitgeist-gobbling 4-by-4 SUV vehicles. I’ve never gotten close to a whole fleet of the things before. They really are more similar to tanks than jeeps. So palpably unnecessary in leafy London suburbs, they seethe with sadistic imperial I’m-All-Right-Jack (or George W) smugness. A firm reminder, as if there weren’t enough, that whether you visit the USA or not, the USA will always pay a visit to you. Enormous fender grates, ripe for easily scraping off the bodies of slow-moving environmentalists. I wouldn’t go as far as Mayor Livingstone’s unkind labelling of London SUV owners as “complete idiots”, but when apologists speak of “increased personal safety” for their children, I can’t help thinking of similar arguments by those who want to keep handguns under their pillows. Still, stopped in my strolling by such a silent and gleaming flotilla of status symbols, I cheekily ask Ms Antonia to pose among them.