Jon Ronson

One piece, I’m Loving Aliens Instead, is sprinkled with the sort of gold Robbie Williams was looking for when he headed over to Hollywood searching for sanity after Take That made his life a misery.

As with every story in the book, the tale is as baffling as it is slapstick.

Williams, in a fragile mental state, had given up reading the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and instead taken to the study of UFOs, watching DVDs such as UFO Space Anomalies: 1999–2006.

A Ronson fan, Williams wanted the humorist and journalist to join him on his exploration into alien life, and the pair rolled up at a convention in the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

I’m Loving... is the tale of their adventure, which saw the attendees as intrigued by the pop star imposter as Williams was by the paranormal believers.

“I like funny stories about absurd things,” explains Ronson, before he arrives in Brighton to flesh out the background behind the tales.

“The absurd unfolding narrative when the people inside the story have got no idea and the whole thing is spiralling out of control.

“I say that in a humane way. I am like that myself all the time, always struck down by anxieties and stupid irrational behaviour based on an entirely irrational set of processes. And when the people are inside that bubble, they take it very seriously and all manner of terrible or absurd things happen.”

Williams was prompted to telephone Ronson for the same reason Ronson was invited to root through Stanley Kubrick’s archive at Childwickbury Manor: the protagonists are fans.

Williams had read Ronson’s books; Kubrick was obsessed with Ronson’s BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hotel Auschwitz, though the director had died before Ronson made it to his estate.

“It was amazing but after a while, the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. After a while the incredible joy and excitement of getting to go to Stanley Kubrick’s house and look through his stuff was replaced with the realisation there were a thousand f****** boxes in front of me, and I had to open every one of them.”

He says he’d be lying if he spent years going up to Stanley Kubrick’s house and skipping down the street with a sense of joy.

“It became daunting and hard work. But now it’s over, I look back – like I do with all of my stories – with a sense (and I know this will sound like a platitude) that it was a privilege.”

That access, being able to go to places and do things other people wouldn’t have the opportunity to do, is the best thing about being a journalist for Ronson.

It’s allowed him to make gentle portraits of eccentrics including London-based Bin Laden supporter Omar Bakri Mohammed, and Ian Paisley.

He’s fetched up, with his canny, disarming, baffled awe, with the Ku Klux Klan and at disgraced BBC producer Ray Gosling’s Manchester home.

“He was big hero of mine and he announced on television that he had mercy killed his lover, who was dying of Aids, about 20 years ago. He was arrested, then it turned out he hadn’t killed her at all, he had made the whole thing up. So I went to see him.

“That culminated in me being in some dodgy flat on a council estate in Manchester being screamed at by a really drunk Ray Gosling.

“And even something like that, which most people wouldn’t like, I still felt kind of privileged that I’d got a job where this could happen to me.

“I never hate it, even when it’s unpleasant. I always think, ‘Wow’.”

Now living full-time in New York, he is currently putting the finishing touches to his first piece of non-fiction, Frank.

But he refuses to confirm or deny that the screenplay is about his old bandmate Frank Sidebottom, for whom he played keyboards for three years when he was in his early 20s and who inspired a move to Manchester to be in the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey! Big Band.

Frank will not be Ronson’s first foray into film. His 2004 book about the US army’s exploration of New Age concepts, The Men Who Stare At Goats, was turned into big screen fodder in 2009 and starred George Clooney .

Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson take the lead roles in Frank, as an off-the-wall musician and a young man who form a band.

“I never read a review before I go to see a film,” says Ronson, “because for me a film is completely structured on unfolding stuff, when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Did you ever see the Swedish film Let The Right One In? I went to see it and I didn’t even know what genre it was and so the film started and I had no idea what I was going to see. For me, that increases the pleasure by a million. It was incredible.”

After five years writing Frank and co-writing with Brightonian Peter Stroughton (who also worked on The Men Who Stare At Goats), Ronson is resolute.

“When you’re writing the film, you’re thinking the audience is going to know absolutely nothing and then be surprised as it goes on… so if I give stuff away I’ll be ruining it for people!”

• Jon Ronson will be at Brighton Dome Studio Theatre, New Road, on Sunday, October 7. Starts 2.30pm, tickets £12. Call 01273 709709