"Life is like a guitar solo. It's loud, shapeless and it goes on too long."

A mysterious woman walks into the Havoc Bar and Grill, an end-of-the-world watering hole, and offers to perform for its less than salubrious clientele. And although her surroundings are not conducive and the sound system distinctly ropy, her music is triumphant. And that guitar? Why does that guitar resemble flesh? With hair, with nipples, and blood coursing down its body as her fanfare reaches a crescendo?

Geoff Nicholson writes fetish novels. Be it the black-bodied insect cars of Still Life With Volkswagens, the committed mapping of a city's sexuality in Bleeding London, or the shrimping of the distinctly kinky Footsucker, Nicholson beings a uniquely forensic eye to bear on a nation of obsessives. In that respect, Flesh Guitar is pretty much same-old same-old.

Jenny Slade is the player. The book is less the narrative of her life so much as a skein of anecdotes, articles, individual memories. Many from by Bob Arnold, Slade's self-confessed number one fan and editor of academic fanzine, The Journal of Sladean Studies. And the Havoc show? That was her last hoorah. Which is why she gave the instrument away. Why Bob is so angry that he arrived just too late.

But before you go thinking you have Nicholson's book taped, he shifts tack. There is a surreal element to this novel; a toe dipped into fantasy that pushes it out of the ordinary and towards the extraordinary. The flesh guitar itself is a real Kafkian nightmare.

And like, how come Jenny Slade can appear to several of the century's seminal players in their defining moment? She was there on Robert Johnson's deathbed in 1938, for example. She had some things to say about posthumous fame to Hendrix. She had words with a 14-year-old Frank Zappa just when he thought drums were the bee's-knees. And poor old Kurt Cobain? Who do you think helped with the suicide note?

What's great about Nicholson is his way with detail. If you're going to write about obsession, you'd better get it right, be it the complexities of VW model numbers, or shoe leathers or, as here, knowing the right names to drop. The musical novel, like the musical film, is the hardest to do. Think Breaking Glass, think Hearts of Fire. God, think The Commitments. Or rather, don't. Nicholson mentions Clapton and Townshend, yes, but knows enough to speak of guiterrorists like Derek Bailey, Steve Albini, and, Jesus, K. K. Null.

You can trust him to steer you right on these, and go with the flow on everything else. Flesh Guitar is no career defining moment like Bleeding London, maybe, but is a delight by any reasonable definition of the word.