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Andrew Mueller is a one-man walking Venn diagram. He is perhaps the only man in the world to have interviewed the top brass of Hizbollah who could also take Straitjacket Fits as his specialist Mastermind subject (he did the liner notes for the Fits' "best-of"); a former music hack and friend of Bono who has swapped a spot at the bar reviewing rubbish gigs in favour of travelling to far-flung, chaotic corners of the world and dodging the occasional bullet.
Mueller, a 38-year-old Australian who has lived in London since the early 1990s, has spent much of this century's first years travelling to fledgling and failed states - countries broken down or in the first flush of independence.
I Wouldn't Start From Here: A Misguided Tour of the Early 21st Century sees Mueller touring post-conflict Kosovo with former British MP Lord Paddy Ashdown; dodging Israeli rifle fire with Palestinian activists; patrolling post-invasion Basra with British squaddies; and trying to find something to do on a Friday night in luxurious Luxembourg (by way of comparison, it would seem).
"It did occur to me that in terms of the kind of conflicts that have bedevilled the world around this period, there can't have been that many people who have stood in the middle of that many of them," he says. "If I could put together a book which drew in the Middle East and the Balkans and Northern Ireland and one or two others, then it might say something about something - and if not, at least be entertaining. Either is good."
The book sees Mueller in post-9/11 Iraq and Afghanistan, in the midst of Western-inspired upheaval, and, several years after Nato intervention, in Kosovo - whose post-bombing plight has long fallen off the front pages. He travels to Abkhazia, a breakaway fragment of post-Soviet Georgia where the streets are lined, strangely, with eucalyptus trees.
Along the way, the details and snapshots are not those usually found in eye-witness accounts of the worlds hotspots - instead, Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and the upsetting.
"I think having been a rock journalist can be good training for that kind of thing because of the certain amount of quirkiness and reverence and self-indulgence that's encouraged when you're a rock journalist. You end up gravitating towards the same things.
"Journalism does tend to have a certain mob-rule about it, and a certain received wisdom does start to coalesce. I think it becomes quite difficult for mainstream staff journalists and news journalists - which I am not - to deviate from that."
The centrepoint of the book is Mueller's arrest in Cameroon in West Africa - he has been to visit the English-speaking western chunk of the country, which wants to secede from the Francophone majority. Detained at a meeting of the pro-independence party, what follows is a genteel and mercifully brief incarceration, with a cast of hilarious characters.
"That whole weekend there were several points where I remember thinking, 'This cannot possibly get any more ridiculous.' And at several points I went, 'No, I take it back, it just has.'
"If the putative Republic of Southern Cameroon ever does gain independence they have expressed a wish I will return as Australia's High Commissioner. And I don't have the certificate to prove it, but I think someone declared me an honorary citizen at some point. And there is, somewhere, a hat I was given shortly before I was arrested that someone keeps promising to send me."
During his brief incarceration, Mueller writes a country standard (his attempt at a jail-wont-break-me classic like Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues) - its creation, and his subsequent dumping by a singer-songwriter girlfriend, give him the idea of forming a country band - something, it seems, which will form the basis of another book.
But this one is anything other than a light-hearted sashay through the world's troublezones. Mueller does not flinch in his descriptions of poverty and hopelessness.
"The most depressing and awful place in the book is Gaza. It's everything bad a place can be, it's frightening, really dangerous, incredibly claustrophobic, it will make the most relaxed person intensely paranoid, and to make matters worse it just seemed to be overwhelmingly populated by really quite nice people.
"I am sure there are people there who are arseholes, but certainly not the people I spent time with. They didn't deserve to live in a place like that. It was a really dreadful place to be and a really nice place to be able to leave."
Conversely - and a surprise, surely, to anyone who might have been keeping notes on this barmy slice of Adriatic Europe over the last few decades - Albania emerges as somewhere offering a glimpse of hope.
Even in the handful of years since the start of this millennium, there are places Mueller has been that are already out-of-bounds - Gaza, which features several times, was made a no-go zone for Western journalists by the abduction of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was released last week. And Iraq - where Mueller wanders around a bustling Baghdad market weeks after the fall of Saddam's regime - is now covered mostly from the safety of the heavily guarded Green Zone.
"There is no way I would attempt the same journey I did in 2003," says Mueller of his first Iraqi journey. "You can just shoot yourself at home and save yourself the trouble, because the end result is going to be the same.
"We drove overland across the desert from Amman in Jordan. If you are bearing down on a kind of unmarked, unnamed and unpredicted checkpoint staffed by two slightly agitated looking blokes waving guns around it's slightly too late to think, 'Maybe I shouldn't have come.'"
Mueller, however, points out that he carried neither bullet wounds nor scars from torture. "There is always a tendency to focus on what is the most picturesque danger, and get obsessed with that, and that's usually not the most dangerous thing there is."
"You talk about all the glamorous stuff like guns and unexploded ordnance and kidnapping, but in any place like that, two of the most dangerous things you are going to do are eat the food and get in a car.
"However, the biggest danger comes from stupid, overindulged young men who think they know everything. It's certainly preferable if your society's stupid indulged young men are encouraged to pick up electric guitars rather than rifles, though there are cases where you could wonder what's worse. Young men seeking applause are quite often a driving factor in both considerations. I really do think they come from the same place.
- I Wouldnt Start From Here: A Misguided Travel Tour of Early 21st Century - Picador, $40
