The book's fourteen chronological chapters read like a procession of pivotal endings, spanning the dissolution of Race's marriage and several other relationships, the onset of the Berlin Wall's collapse while he is recording in West Berlin, and a sprawling catalogue of technical malfunctions, brushes with violence, harrowing drug use, and other hazards that arise with almost comic regularity.

Beginning when Race was eighteen and his early band, Plays With Marionettes, was just making its mark in Melbourne, Road Series follows his dogged pursuit of not just music but the road itself. Tours and recording sessions find him shuffling through different continents, with repeated visits to Italy (where he now lives permanently, along with the rest of Australia) and Mali. Race is unabashedly romantic in depicting his vagabond lifestyle, even at its darkest points, and he ultimately seems as fond of the serial unpredictability as he is of his own music.

Having walked away from a lucrative record contract offered to his band The Wreckery in 1986, Race muses: 'It seems to me that to be popular, you have to be commercial rubbish'. He commits himself to being a respected figure surviving on the fringes of popular music, forgoing wider trends for his own fevered interests, which range from arty British punk and gritty American rock'n'roll to ambitious sound installations and open-ended African blues.

When Race rattles off the challenges inherent in his chosen course – 'The money is bad, the drives are long, the audiences small and the competition fierce' – it's as much a portrait of compulsion as of passion. 'The road is addictive,' he admits, resigned to the fact that his persistent world touring has disrupted his personal relationships (with partners and children) to the point where he is making the rounds 'singing the lyrics from the train wreck of my life'.

This candour makes Race's accounts more refreshing than most would-be music memoirs, as does the heady colour he works into setting the scene. 'Red and blue chemical smokestacks break the horizon, discharging mystery cocktails into a mass of bruised cloud,' he writes of the newly christened Czech Republic circa 1993. His articulate layering of detail often builds to a surreal crescendo, as when he is caught in memorable places (playing at a maximum security prison in Poland or a desert music festival near Timbuktu) or situations (snowstorms, power outages, mid-tour pneumonia, and countless showdowns with drug dealers, border officials, and police). He writes in the present tense, with no quotation marks around dialogue, making his tales fluid and immediate.

Hugo Race in concert, Poland 2006 (photograph by Grzegorz Koprowicz, via Wikimedia Commons)The more fevered moments recall the similarly structured book The Sick Bag Song (2015) by fellow Australian rock nomad Nick Cave, in whose band Race once played. But while Cave's book transforms a tour into a long, unhinged poem thriving in his own head, Road Series is grounded by Race's intense interest in where these episodes hang in the wider landscape of world history. Thus, an Italian tour is set against Silvio Berlusconi's sex scandal, a recording session in Mali is framed by the encroaching of Islamic jihadists, and the first chapter captures the flood of overseas bands touring Australia in the early 1980s, as Plays With Marionettes earn slots supporting New Order and Violent Femmes.

In a coy touch, however, Race omits the surnames of most of the people mentioned in the book, which means that while Cave is easy to recognise ('The singer, Nick, is already a charismatic underground star'), outside research might be needed to confirm other identities. One also wonders how Race can recall such minor particulars from specific gigs after decades of touring. But, as with entire conversations retold from years past, we simply have to accept Race's recollections at face value – and they do make for a good story.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in the early 1980s. Left to right: Hugo Race, Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey, Nick Cave, and Blixa Bargeld (source: flickr)

Originating from pieces published in Overland magazine, these chapters may frustrate some readers as isolated glimpses of Race's touring adventures rather than as comprehensive accounts of other facets of his life. (His children are mentioned less often than cult music figures like Howlin' Wolf.) But these gaps also help distinguish this book from the typical music-business exposé. Like Race's music, which is marked by persistent experimentation across different genres and collaborations, these staggered reports are entrancing precisely for their focus on heightened bouts of voyaging and revelation.

Along 'the infinite curvature of the road', alternating between spikes of enthusiasm and disillusionment, Race gives himself over to the journey. Indeed, he salutes the very incompleteness of his quest: 'The music is my cure, blues that cut to the heart of things, looking for answers when there's none to be found.'