416 pages, large format book stuffed with anecdotes, exotica and pictures
£12.99 + £3.25 postage and packing
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Would you like me to sign a dedication inside the book? If so let me know what you would like me to write in the box below.
One night in 1969 aged 16, I was far from home, watching Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band in the Whisky a Go Go. Somehow my mate and I were separated in the dark, sweaty, sexy club and I ended up standing at the infamous ‘meat rack’ at Piccadilly Circus where junkies waited impatiently for the stroke of midnight to get their next day’s supply of cocaine or heroin from the 24-hour chemist, where dealers waited to buy up what the junkies didn’t need, where tourists had come to bathe in the neon, where stoned hippies sprawled on the steps under Eros, and where old men came to rent boys.
Among all these people I began to feel lonely and a little scared until a smiling man approached me and asked if I was hungry. Dumbly I let him buy me a plate of spaghetti and went to his flat to sleep on the floor. Against the odds, he was just a nice guy and I was intact in the morning although he did show me some porn. My parents had no idea that I was even in London, let alone trailing back to flats with strangers, and the thought that my children or anyone’s children might do the same at the age of 16 makes the blood run cold.
I hitchhiked the 60 miles home and resumed my studies in the provinces, bu
t the die was cast, the damage was done; I felt intoxicated, like I’d just had sex for the first time and I wanted it again. My new love was London and she was a dangerous mistress.
Just weeks later I was truanting again, up the Smoke on a mission to find David Bowie’s Arts Lab (failed), to do a bit of shoplifting in Soho (didn’t get caught) and to watch Miles Davis at the Hammersmith Odeon (magical). I slept on a station bench and went straight to school from the milk train.
By 1976 I was a resident, working at a record company in the West End. Yeah baby.
Now a writer, I’ve also been a band manager, a pig farmer, a recording engineer, a fishmonger and Joan Collins’ chauffeur.
In 2007, my first book Guns, Cash and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Managers was published and London Babylon is the second.
Read an extract from London Babylon
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