The blunt-end assessments are more forthcoming now that the band is history. He’s straight-up about which albums worked and which didn’t. Manager Gary Morris’s overbearing style is a recurring motif. A natural introvert, Moginie recounts coping badly in the face of global adulation and bullying from their American label: “A year off? F—that. No! Get back over here as soon as you f—ing can. Jesus.”

Some recollections are disarming in their intimacy and clarity, such as the immediate aftermath of Garrett losing his mother in a house fire in 1977. “Pete [was] crouched on the floor in the kitchen … he had red eyes and cuts, bruises, ashes and burns all over his body and was rocking backwards and forwards on his haunches with his hands on his head.”

Each member is sketched with deep respect and affection in small vignettes spanning decades of band meetings and hotel corridors. But their (first) split manifests from a punch-drunk mess of “radio indifference to our new music, the shrinking crowds, the disconnection from family, Gary’s combativeness and, most of all, our own impossible expectations of each other”.

The band would reunite 15 years later, as we know, for a global victory lap that sealed a peerless legend. But those intervening years are the book’s raison d’etre, as the decommissioned guitarist sets his heart on finding the birth parents who gave him away. “Was there something wrong with me? … wasn’t I good enough for them? I probably deserved to be abandoned.”

He spoils his own mystery in the opening pages — his birth father, Brian, has a cameo on page 2 — but the consummation of his search is incredibly moving and profound nonetheless, especially in the light of all that’s collapsed, by this time, around him: not just his band but his marriage and much of the confidence and purpose that papered over a lifelong absence of belonging.

The Silver River of the title turns out to flow deeper still. It’s a landmark in County Offaly, Ireland, where his story ultimately leads with a musical kind of logic: a nagging sketch of a refrain that finally bursts into rich and colourful harmony.

“I have been humbled,” the writer concludes after one under-attended trainwreck of a gig in a rusty roadhouse with his post-Oils band, The Family Dog. “I’m the man who fell to Earth.”

That scene is recounted in his early pages too — the space usually reserved in books of this kind for a fanfare of spectacular conquest.

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It’s that humility, not global pop success or any other illusion of victory, that remains Jim Moginie’s ground zero.

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