Before the myth-making, chin-stroking male became the prototype for the Music Writer (hello, Lester Bangs, Nick Kent and Greil Marcus), guess what? There were women.

Back in March, Kate Mossman’s brilliant Radio 4 documentary, The Women Who Wrote Rock, took us back to Rave’s Dawn James and the NME’s Nancy Lewis, who described the stars of their day in everyday detail, without reverence or deference. After them came Julie Burchill, Lucy O’Brien, Miranda Sawyer, Alex Kadis, Amy Raphael, Lynsey Hanley, Barbara Ellen, the world-straddling Caitlin Moran, Kitty Empire, Laura Barton, Laura Snapes… I could go on. Female music journalists aren’t particularly rare. Look around. We’re here.

Then there’s Sylvia Patterson, one of pop music’s most penetrating writers since 1986 – a working-class Scot who came down to London to work at its “swingorilliant” HQ: Smash Hits magazine. She describes their offices thus, in her 100mph prose: “a riotous open-plan explosion of Jiffy bags, cassette tapes, 12-inch and seven-inch cardboard envelopes housing vinyl delights and those brand new, state-of-the-art silver CDs, which everyone associated with the dullards’ favourite, Dire Straits”.

Patterson’s not as well known as the Big Boys because she’s never puffed up her own talent, but also because she writes about pop, which serious souls still give a bad rap. This is utterly unjustified: Smash Hits was always critically switched on, never bowing before its high priests (behold the naming of Sir Paul “Fab Wacky Thumbs Aloft” McCartney), and it got artists talking about big issues as much as the fun stuff (I found out about Section 28 through an 1988 interview with the Pet Shop Boys, for example – I was 10 – as well as their thoughts on silly hats). Smash Hits’ crime, along with Patterson’s, was to be clever and funny at the same time. Fancy that.

For all 427 pages of this often hilarious, often angry memoir, Patterson fillets out the pretentious bones of pop, leaving its glistening meat. At first glance, it’s a collection of bawdy, behind-the-scenes stories – and crivvens, as she’d say, the legal read must have been eye-watering. In 1986, Patterson pads out an interview with New Order’s sullen Bernard Sumner by mentioning being woken up by him and “two American foxtresses” (he has a wife at home, which Patterson doesn’t realise). She presents Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie memorably in 1992: “his jaw meandering around his alarmingly grey face as the ecstasy throbbed through his churning DNA”. She asks the newly married, religious Prince what he does “with an ill-timed erection these days”, and deems Damon Albarn “not only Blur’s but the actual era’s monumental pain in the arse”. Pop’s hypocrisy and bad behaviour are revealed in glorious technicolour. Many writers would run a mile.

This is also a story about Patterson’s journey through the industry via music, style and women’s magazines, and she shows genuine humility when she writes about herself personally. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing” is a regular refrain; she also writes with real sadness, at times, about her alcohol-swilling misadventures.

The most affecting passages concern her family: the deaths of her father and older, disabled brother, Ronnie, along with her mother’s alcoholism. She writes about these situations directly, without fuss, and the effect is very powerful. “Note to those volatile families with anything to feel guilty about: make it better, if you possibly can, while they’re still alive,” she concludes, simply.

In its final chapters, the book becomes an angry tale about music journalism’s decline, from her reaction to a 2001 NME cover featuring the word “Miami’, written in cocaine, on a model’s breasts (she includes a jaw-dropping resignation email written not long after the event), to her rage at the mocking commentators and Twitter trolls who drive pop culture now.

I’m Not With the Band is a title that speaks volumes at this point more than ever – Patterson tells us where the music journalist should be, and what they should do, without filters. She should be held up as the prototype for the form’s future – a most swingorilliant one.

I’m Not With the Band is published by Sphere (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.19