Pop bands (that's pop, the most vital and vigorous of all musics) would be nothing without their audience, and, excitingly, vice versa. Supply and demand. What Idle Worship tries to do (occasionally very successfully) is reconcile the two - that is, stars as fans. O'Connor (yes, of that family O'Connor) is a good example, an author who as a teenager was a hopeless devotee of Geldof's every word. At the end he meets his old hero and finds him an affable bloke. Maybe that's the most any fan can really ask.

It's a telling contrast from at least two other pieces in here. Editor Roberts himself contributes the longest, a peon to Debbie Harry that starts out promisingly enough, but by the end - when he finally meets her, in the twilight of her erratic career - his ardour is, frankly, the tiniest bit sad. Not, however, quite so sad as the awful, self-promoting journalist and TV presenter Caitlin Moran's frankly unattractive thoughts on Suede. Moran, in her grisly look-at-me prose, tells us Suede are great, and then proceeds to tell us (big globs of interview) that she's met them. That she's been to the singer's house. She ends her piece with a crap cartoon. She knows its crap, and that says more about her than anything she's written. The line of fandom is surely one that shouldn't be crossed. Once the object of affection is on the wrong side of the footlights it all goes horribly wrong. When those players are Bono and Sinatra, it's pass the sick-bag.

Contrast that with author Martin Millar's reflections on Led Zeppelin. The Zepp LPs, he tells us, were common currency around the schoolyards of his youth; you would carry them like some badge of maturity even if (as in his case) you had no record-player on which to hear them. The metaphysical recollections of the band playing his hometown as gods descended to the earth are something surely understood by the average Take That fan. The young Millar imagined his heroes engaged in their everyday bacchanalia (which, as it happens, may not have been too far from the truth) but the odds on him ever crossing that line were surely less than for real gods walking Glasgow streets.

There are, of course, other incarnations of the form, and most of them in this context belong to the Americans. (That is, if we exclude Mark E. Smith, obstreperous Fall frontman, and without doubt one of the least linear minds in the known world: his self-typed pages are fascinating.) Stephen J. Malkmus of indie-darlings Pavement wades in with Vedder as Merton: 2001, reimagining Pearl Jam's leader as a futurist religious mystic and using a fictional letter to comment on contemporary music. It's one of the best pieces in the book. For his part, Sonic Youth singer/guitarist Thurston Moore offers a short fiction on the ever-popular star-fucking.

Idle Worship is in its way a sequel to Fred and Judy Vermorel's essential Starlust. That was a (1985) collection of fan letters and fantasies, at once obsessional, filthy and occasionally desperately sad. (Looking back, how many of them would now confess to writing letters like those about Nick Heyward?) This is better written, more considered, and as a result less compulsive. At its best it can be amusing and a little telling (Millar, O'Connor, Robert Newman on Crass, Kristin Hersh on Patti Smith), but in the end it's more about writers than subjects. Anyone who really wants to know what it's all about would be well advised to find a copy of the earlier book and Tippex in Take That and East 17 for Boy George and Adam Ant.