I have never worked with or for Mark Ellen, the music journalist and editor who spent his time at Oxford in Ugly Rumours with Tony Blair, wrote for Smash Hits alongside Neil Tennant, and co-anchored Live Aid before founding (or relaunching) five magazines: New Music News, Select, Q, Mojo and the Word (two have survived the great print extinction disaster, Q and Mojo).

This has probably been a rash oversight on my part, because if his memoir, Rock Stars Stole My Life!, is big on anything, it's generous bonhomie. Music journalism, for Ellen, is a forgiving clubhouse for addled charlatans and bass-playing logorrheics, a place of nerdy inclusivity. He may lament that he was born too late for the 60s and too early for punk, but Ellen witnessed first-hand a series of golden ages of music (and music writing) in which budgets existed, artists spoke openly and a freewheeling, evergreen adolescence was made possible on the spoils.

A Zelig on adjectives (nothing stronger), he is there, in the thick of things, as pop's dubious charabanc rolls through the decades. His baptism by fire occurs when, on assignment for Record Mirror, he is beaten up by Elvis Costello's people for being a hippy from the Record Mirror. As an Oasis logo rendered in ice drips away in the background, Noel Gallagher lists precisely which songs he has ripped off, and how. Lady Gaga lets him see her naked.

The cameos of non-pop stars are just as fascinating. Anji Hunter, who would one day be Blair's chief lieutenant, takes bullish charge of musical tastes in their student house. TV presenter Paula Yates is still alive in these pages – and John Peel, revealed with great fondness as a paranoid bletherer. (Ellen takes over his R1 show at one point.) A pre-fame Anton Corbijn is some talented Dutch kid, sharing a squat with Ellen.

This is not a memoir that dishes dirt, however, which is an opportunity missed. Van Morrison is a curmudgeon – not exactly the most revelatory news. Ellen renders the amphetamine-addled pit of vipers that was the NME in the late 70s – Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons et al – with a mixture of recidivist hero worship and avuncular indulgence.

One of this memoir's most rewarding subtexts is how most of our idols have feet of clay, and materials more debased than even that. Ellen saves his most hurt exasperation for the chief exec of Emap, the publishing house that had so long nurtured Ellen. He didn't have the courage to sack Ellen face to face.

Mostly, though, there is nothing but indulgent fondness for the narcissists and sociopaths behind the music, even when they drive Ellen to despair. He opens up the diary he kept while organising several years of the Q awards. The horse trading and the logistics of their ferrying (Concorde? In through the kitchens?) are hilarious. In some of the best writing in the book, Ellen reflects on how impossibly absurd the lives of these superstars are. He feels, in truth, a little sorry for them – except for Rihanna, whose infamous seven-night, seven-city, 777 plane jolly serves as a narrative bookend to his story. It is a PR stunt of such hubris, excess and contemptuous tardiness it dwarfs the Spinal Tap moments of most previous generations.

There is a downside to the writing itself. Ellen recounts conversations that happened more than 30 years ago verbatim, even when a microphone could not have been present. His generation founded pop discourse as I met it, growing up. He helped coin the fizzy lingo of Smash Hits ("down the dumper!") but also propagated a "stout yeoman of the bar" style – a kind of florid, chummy verbal excess. People call one another things such as "old chap" a lot in here, and even if this begins as a gentle, faintly camp satire on class, eventually it speaks of something quite different. Ellen, though, is conscious of the pitfalls of entitlement (even if the award winner is actually fully entitled to them). What emerges from the immensely readable Rock Stars Stole My Life! is a sense of the twin, symbiotic absurdities that are fandom and stardom, and the old middlemen once caught between them, the hacks.