Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

There are a few books that I come across that fall into the category of ‘too good not to share’. I was only partway into Everett’s first volume of memoirs when I found myself sending paragraphs by email to friends. It really is that good...

His account of making the film Hearts of Fire qualifies it for this blog as he seems to have spent the whole shoot permanently soused, although that could be said for quite a few other occasions. The finished film was a disaster, the full-on, no-survivors crash of my career, as he puts it. He hasn’t made The Next Best Thing with Madonna by this point...

Things don’t really get off to a good start with Hearts of Fire, despite Bob Dylan being cast. Everett really doesn’t gel with his leading lady, and when it comes for them to film a ‘bedroom’ scene, she runs screaming from the set. Help is at hand from his make up team, however:

Meinir sidled up to the bed, as the producer, the director and the lighting cameraman stood around my naked body, deciding what they could shoot instead. She winked as she opened her little Aladin’s cave of a kit. Inside gleamed a bottle of vodka. Well, if one couldn’t get legless after one’s leading lady had fled the lovemaking scene, when could one? I settled down on the floor in the corner of the set and drank the whole bottle with the help of hair and make-up; when the powers that be finally decided on the next scene, I could barely walk.

Meinir seems to be keeping the cast properly refreshed, including the star, Dylan, whose tipple is Jim Beam:

One day Meinir was walking across the lot at Shepperton when a bottle broke inside her kit and began to leak, leaving an incriminating and odorous trail in her wake. The producer was following behind. Pat and I were behind him. We watched in horror as he bent down and sniffed. “Meinir, what have you got in your kit?” he asked. Meinir gasped slightly as she observed the stream of whisky dripping from Aladdin’s cave. But this girl was quick on her feet. “I’m washing my brushes. It’s alcohol. Must have spilt! Oh dear, I’d better nip back to the truck, hadn’t I?” And she beat a retreat before our producer could move on to the next question.

The production moves to Toronto, where they are to film a live show in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, they have time to kill before the shooting starts, and make use of the minibar in Dylan’s trailer:

We all piled into his trailer before the show and got incredibly drunk. Bob strummed on his guitar. Assistants came and went. Richard dropped in. By the time we got to the wings we were in extremely high spirits, but Bob was too wobbly to make it up the very steep steps to the stage.

Somehow they keep it together long enough to film the gig. The shoot finally comes to the end with one last scene to do:

On the last day, we shot a scene in a limo... We played the scene over and over. We chatted between takes. We had drinks in the scene and they were constantly refilled – the real thing, needless to say. The props guys who were in charge of administering the drinks didn’t even ask. Apple juice was for babies. Bob dozed off, sinking into himself like a parrot. We must have been there for a couple of hours. When we finished the first assistant opened the car door. Bob climbed out. He looked around, squinting. “Where’s the hotel?” he said, apparently confused, thinking he had been driven home.

The end result wasn’t a hit, or, in Everett’s words:

The film brought my career to a standstill...

Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Marx Brothers, but had never got around to reading Harpo’s biography until now.

The famous dumb act of the show – he never spoke on stage or screen – Harpo was second eldest of the brothers, and between leaving school at eight and starting out on the stage with his family, he did a multitude of jobs around New York, where he grew up. After several years of getting fired from one position after another, he tries out as a piano player, having learned two pieces from his brother Chico:

The address in the ad I answered for a piano player was on the Bowery. It turned out to be a saloon. When I told the bartender why I was there he jerked a thumb toward the back room and said, “Mrs. Schang.” In the back room stood the biggest woman I had ever seen. She was about six-foot-two and none of it fat, but all bone and muscle, a Powerful Katinka in the flesh. She was leaning on a piano, smoking a cigarette and drinking straight gin.

Mrs. Schang runs a honky tonk on Long Island called the Happy Times Tavern, which serves booze to the men digging the canals nearby and supplies them with girls later:

My job as Mrs. Schang outlined it was simple. “When I tell you to start playing the piano, you play,” she said. “If a fight starts you get behind the piano and stay there – understand? – until I tell you it’s safe to come out. I take care of all the fights around here.”

There are plenty of those in the place. The clientele thirsting for liquor, women and roughhouse. Sure enough on the first Saturday night, things kick off:

The brawl didn’t last long. Mrs. Schang waded into the thick of it swinging a bung-starter. By the time she’d heaved six guys out the back door, two at a time, the rest of the crew got the idea and quieted down. The seventh guy she grabbed was me. She hoisted me out from behind the piano and dropped me onto the stool. “I’m paying you to play, you son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Play!”

Harpo works alongside Max the bartender, Mr. Schang and Christopher Schang, the landlady’s son.

Both Mr. Schang and Christopher took orders from the Madam the same as Max and all the rest of us. And like any of us, they would pass the warning along if the Madam started hitting the gin. When Mrs. Schang went on a binge, she would roar around the joint like a wounded bull. It was wise to stay out of her path on such occasions.

More than that, the rest of the staff aren’t all that they seem. Max, Christopher and Mrs. Schang are making an increasing number of mysterious nighttime “business trips” leaving Harpo to mind the bar while they’re gone. One night, Max doesn’t return and nothing is said of him again.

After Max’s disappearance Christopher stewed in a perpetual state of the jitters and the Madam got roaring drunk and stayed drunk. The mysterious business trips stopped. A week later Mrs. Schang finally sobered up. She had absorbed so much gin it stopped having any effect, and this seemed to make her madder than ever before. She came into the back room and grabbed me off the piano stool. “Get in the buggy, out front,” she said. “You’re driving tonight.” By the time I got in the buggy she was already there, waiting for me. then she told me to run to the kitchen and get a meat knife. When I did, she slit her pocketbook and stuck a pistol and a pint of gin between the cover and the lining. She said to get going, and fast. I asked where we were going. Mrs. Schang said, “Keep driving east until we get to the Pot O’ Gold. I’m going to kill Louie Neidorf.”

Sensibly, Neidorf doesn’t show up:

The Madam charged out of the Pot O’ Gold cursing a blue streak, with me running to keep up with her. Her eyes were wild and her hair was flying all over the place. She plotzed herself in the carriage and took out her gin bottle and took a long swig. I never saw anybody get so drunk so fast. All of a sudden she got the idea she had fired at Louie Neidorf and missed him. “You little son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed. “I missed!” Now it was all my fault.

After draining the gin bottle and letting out a curse I’d never heard from a woman’s lips before, Mrs. Schang takes over the reins and drives the horse back to the Happy Times Tavern as quickly as possible. Harpo wisely hides in the stable with the horse. The next night he passes out while at the piano, his head swimming with measles. The girls working the joint club together and get him a rail ticket back to the Upper East Side.

Harpo’s exit is timely, to say the least. As he recovers from measles his former employers are indicted as a violent gang of robbers who’d turned over at least twenty properties on Long Island. His years working Vaudeville afterwards are quiet in comparison...

Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall by Luke Haines

I picked up this autobiographic tome on a recommendation, without any particular interest in the music scene in the title, or having knowingly listened to a single note by Haines’s group The Auteurs. I finished it sharing his disdain for his contemporary musicians and quoting sections of the book to anyone unlucky enough to get in my way. I even listened to a couple of his songs as well...

Haines starts his story in a band called The Servants whose career fizzled out in the beginning of the 90s. He’s been in the group a few years and likes a drink, although he’s nearly put off the sauce for good after a particularly bad experience on red wine one day:

On a dreary Tuesday autumn afternoon I line up three bottles of red wine. Three bullets, each with my name on. Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. I down the bottles in just over two hours. I could probably do more but I’m wearier that usual. I pass out on the couch. I dream about red. Swathes of crimson red. I am Isadora Duncan, in a red car, on a red road, with a red sky, and a red scarf caught in a red wheel tightening around my neck. My long skinny dancer’s neck. I’m thrown out of a feverish sleep by the need to vomit. Blood. Throwing up fucking blood. I am by nature a hypochondriac, but to have an irrational fear of death turn into the actual possibility of dying is quite something. Without too much prompting I see a scornful doctor. A severe eastern European lady of retirement age prods at my sides and back. Tuts and shakes her head. Dispassionately she tells me what I already know. That I most probably have serious liver damage. (Tests conform this.) All self inflicted. Give up drinking and smoking. Or die.

Faced with sobriety, Haines gets some solid songwriting under his belt and starts a new band which eventually becomes The Auteurs. The diagnosis of liver damage proves to be wildly inaccurate, allowing him to go back onto the booze, while The Auteurs start to pick up some interest from the music business, and end up lumped together with various chippy Britpop bands. After a couple of successful(ish) years, Haines recalls their nomination for the 1993 Mercury Music prize. He starts the show as he means to go on:

I am already drunk by the time I arrive at Grosvenor House, which is a good start as it is my intention to get colossally drunk this evening.

Just as well that Suede win instead... The evening, already going badly, gets steadily worse. Haines and his friends are

...led upstairs to a private suite in the Grosvenor. It’s the usual bullshit. Cocaine, champagne. More cocaine, more champagne. I fall into a table of glasses generously filled with Perrier Jouët. I have achieved optimum inebriation and am acting like a peasant. Alice is trying to coax me out of the suite. Even Vinall, in his advanced state, knows I am falling apart. The lance corporal makes one final obsequious remark and l let fly. Haymaker. Unlucky sunshine. I am too drunk to connect. Instead my fist goes through a glass panel about three feet wide of my intended target.

Despite the boozy self destruction, the bouts of rage and megalomania and the drug taking, The Auteurs manage three respectable albums before things go totally pear shaped. Haines, like Mark E. Smith, is an unrepentant tippler, and also much prefers alcohol to other substances:

Alcohol became my drug of choice. I’m a good drunk – one of the best you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet. Uncle Lou [Reed] also knew about the booze when he wrote ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’. Booze is my muse. During the mid-90s the Britpop horde devoured the class As like hungry peasants at the eat-as-much-as-you-can meal deal. Really, some of the most unlikely sorts got Dequinceyed up to the gills. Proof, if ever it were needed, that heroin does not always unleash the dark creative beast.

Still, all good things come to an end, and the Auteurs finally disintegrate into an ugly mess of missed tour dates and recriminations. Still, there’s a fine body of work that’s aged a lot better than most of the tosh that was playing during the mid-90s, and by the end of the book, Haines is making music again, (although nothing that he can persuade anyone to buy...) this time with a man who wants to reintroduce absinthe to the UK:

...the potent wormwood spirit that helped turn the French army myopic during the First World War...

I’m rather looking forward to the threatened second volume of memoirs.

Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Reading Renegade is a bit like being locked in a bar with its subject, a man described on the fly leaf as equal parts Johnny Cash, Brian Clough and the classic British pub contrarian with rather too much on his mind. It starts with a good old fashioned rant about former members of his band, The Fall, pauses for biographical notes about Smith and his life in Manchester and Salford, before carrying on in a stream of cantankerous grumbling about the state of the nation, the North, issues about drinking and a potted history of his music. Rambling yes, but never dull.

Smith, known for liking a drink or too, describes getting into LSD as a teenager in an attempt to avoid the drink of choice of his young contemporaries; bottles of booze purloined from parental sideboards:

If anything, I was doing acid to get away from the cider clubs and the sherry clubs. Kids of about fourteen used to nick their mam’s ‘British Sherry’ and be sick all over the house. You could tell where they lived by the drink and vomit stains on the carpet.

After leaving school and working at the docks in Salford, Smith formed The Fall, one of Britain’s most exciting and unpredictable avante garde rock groups, or a noisy racket, depending on your point of view. Smith’s song writing is a combination of distinctive wordplay and characterisation built from the experience of his native North West. Drink plays its part:

The problems started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque. I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.

The Fall are one of the more prolific bands in the country and have toured and recorded relentlessly since the 70s. Smith’s trip to Iceland where they record Hex Enduction Hour included a gig where about a third of the island’s youth came to see them (he apologises for almost certainly having brought about Björk and the Sugarcubes) and copious amounts of the local hooch:

We recorded parts of it in Iceland, which was a very inaccessible place at the time, totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps. I remember firing into it one day and night. I thought my legs had been stolen afterwards.

Continually messed around by hopeless record labels and enjoying a strained relationship with other band members (Smith has sacked over forty musicians over the years) things take a turn for the worse when he divorces his wife (and fellow band member...) Brix. He moves to Edinburgh, which introduces him to whisky:

I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well.

As the 90s progressed, the already uncompromising Smith started getting a reputation as a drunk who should keep of the sauce before the gig:

What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, “Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.” It’s written into the contract – “Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.” I’d rather have it upfront... To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink. The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing is with me, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

He remarks that a lot of people who complain about his drinking are taking copious amounts of other substances as well. Stick to drink, he says:

At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

The boozy nadir is a fight with the band in New York when he is convicted of a drunken assault:

The bottom end of it was that the New York court said I had to go on this alcohol programme, twice a week for six weeks in Bury. But the staff there seemed to have more problems than I had. I didn’t have any problems, to be quite honest. I don’t think I did.

It’s a self justification, but it works for him. Anyway, there’s a method in the madness:

It’s sort of good for me, though, this idea that I’m a mad drunk. It makes people frightened of me.

Abandoned by Anya Peters

Peters’s disturbing memoir is easy to pigeonhole, and I confess that it isn’t the sort of book that I would normally read. It’s an account of a spectacularly miserable childhood of a little girl adopted by her aunt, a woman she always sees as her Mummy, into the violent household she shares with an unpredictable, drunken bully.

Alcohol, predictably, plays a part in the sorry saga. ‘Daddy’, her uncle, is frequently intoxicated, and drunkenly berates Anya, shouting that she doesn’t belong in the house with the rest of the children:

It’s what Daddy is always saying, screaming it out week after week in drunken arguments. “She’s not wanted here, right! She doesn’t belong here... They dumped her over here with you because they didn’t want her over there and she’s not wanted here either. I want her out,” he says snapping open another beer, “She doesn’t belong here.”

Mummy does her best to stick up for Anya, but succumbs to the bottle as well:

“Don’t worry about me,” she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. “I’m as tough as old boots, me.” But she wasn’t; thought neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim. Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream an pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be.

The constant abuse, often physical, progresses into sexual abuse. Anya’s uncle is eventually arrested for his crimes and sent to prison. Anya and her aunt temporarily move to the home of another daughter, but the effect on both of them has been terrible. Anya’s mother is nearly catatonic and drinking heavily again:

During the day, indoors, she sat in the front room with the curtains drawn watching TV, living on Silk Cut and milky tea and her nerves. When she passed me to go to the bathroom one morning after getting a postcard from the boys asking when she was coming home, I smelt drink on her breath.

Despite all these terrible events, Anya manages to pass her A-Levels and qualifies as a lawyer. Unfortunately, her self esteem is badly damaged by her past, and she finds herself in another abusive relationship. She ends up sleeping in her car in Brighton and London, finally breaking away from the spiral of despair by writing her story in a blog which eventually became this book.

Even after all the horrible things that happened to her, Peters shows a lack of rancour and a forgiveness that is humbling. I’m glad I read it for that, but I don’t think it’s an area I’ll investigate again.

Stirred But Not Shaken by Keith Floyd

Somewhere in our flat there is a copy of the brilliant Floyd on Hangovers, a potted history of drink, boozy escapades and spurious cures for over indulgence. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anywhere, so until then, here is Floyd’s autobiography, Stirred But Not Shaken.

Floyd sets the scene at the start of the book with an evening of Bacchanalian excess; there is bare knuckle boxing, glorious roasts, and lakes of whisky and port. At the end of the night, after staggering to his room, he finds himself lying flat on a hard mattress, wired up to tubes and a ventilator. When he can eventually speak, he asks the people milling around his bed about the party:

I said to them, “How did you enjoy the dinner and boxing?” Silence. I said, “Well surely you were there. It was a great night. I mean, there was betting, there was the port, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was the dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?” It was a hospital.

After an alcoholic collapse, Floyd had been suffering hallucinations in intensive care brought on by the drugs keeping him alive and a nasty attack of the DTs. As the doctor kindly pointed out:

“...Drink again as you have before and you will die.”

Floyd started off his professional life as a cook after leaving the army. After several briefly successful ventures in the West Country that all ended in financial disaster, he found himself doing a one off cooking slot on a regional television broadcast at the beginning of the 1980s. It snowballed from there.

For better or for worse, Floyd, and his director David Pritchard, invented the modern TV chef. Before Floyd, everything was a bit staid and formal; Floyd took food out of the studio and into the great outdoors, chatted to the film crew, and most famously, had a constant prop of a glass of wine. Despite his reputation as a rogueish guzzler, he claimed never to have drunk once while filming his series, and the glass of wine was to give him something to do between the action:

I had a bottle of wine on the prep table intended for cooking. But in the absence of any direction from Pritchard, when I ran out of inspiration and words, I said, “I think I’ll have a quick slurp,” to buy valuable seconds to recompense my thoughts.

Despite his insistence that he was never sozzled while on the show, he was shifting a lot of whiskey in between filming:

Increasingly, however, I found myself staying up all night, unable to sleep because I was worrying about how it would go the next day. Slowly and, it seems, inevitably a bottle of whisky was becoming my crutch: a companion that would help me through the hours from midnight to dawn.

This seeped into his home life, and by the time his TV career was over and his fourth marriage was collapsing, he was drinking like a pissed fish:

As far as booze is concerned, I thought I could knock it on the head quite easily. But on the other hand, I felt under pressure with Tess and I couldn’t help myself... Our relationship was deteriorating rapidly, and our life was one long round of screaming matches interspersed with my complete alcoholic blackouts, and romance had long gone. The fairy tale we’d once lived turned into the grim reality that I can now talk about, but it pains me to do so. The fact is I kept a bottle of Scotch in my bedside table. In the mornings, when I awoke I had to have – I didn’t have to but felt that I did – a few large glasses of whisky before I could get downstairs.

The near death experience (his third admission to hospital suffering from the effects of drink and malnutrition – sadly for Floyd, he had come to hate eating) seemed to make him turn things around and late in life he found love again with an old friend and was ready to go back onto the television. A programme was produced for Channel 4 and at the time the book was published he had several new opportunities lined up. He died of a heart attack the night the show was broadcast.

Floyd was a culinary inspiration to millions of viewers who, like me, regard him with great affection. This rambling memoir sounds like a long afternoon at the bar with the man himself and I could hear his distinctive voice rattling off the anecdotes as I read it. I feel it would be appropriate (raises glass) to leave the last word to him:

Sometimes I worry about what I’ve left out. And sometimes I worry about what I’ve put in. but for now, as this book fades to black, I’ll have another pastis. Thank you and au revoir.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

I made the case a while back that I got far more from reading a good Stephen King novel than I had trudging through a particularly dreary offering by John Updike. If I required further proof that the fellow knew his stuff, then this is it.


Part personal memoir on how he got where he did, and part guide for people seriously interested in getting published, On Writing is funny, educational and a good read in itself. It also covers the period in his life when he was drinking heavily, and how his family intervened to stop him before he destroyed all he’d worked for.

King first got pissed on a school trip to Washington from his native Maine in 1966. The coach stopped in New York overnight and the boys lit out for the nearest off license:

A bunch of us more adventurous boys found a package store around the corner from the hotel. I cast an eye over the shelves, aware that my spending money was far from a fortune. There was too much – too many bottles, too many brands, too many prices over ten dollars. Finally I gave up and asked the guy behind the counter (the same bald, bored-looking, gray-coated guy who has, I’m convinced, sold alcohol virgins their first bottle since the dawn of commerce) what was cheap. Without a word, he put a pint of Old Log Cabin whiskey down on the Winston mat beside the cash register. The sticker on the label said $1.95. The price was right. I have a memory of being led onto the elevator later that night – or maybe it was early the next morning... This memory is more like a scene from a TV show than a real memory. I seem to be outside of myself, watching the whole thing. There’s just enough of me left inside to know that I am globally, perhaps even galactically, fucked up.

He spent the rest of the night violently throwing up and wakes up the next day with a demonic hangover. Only a lunatic – a masochistic lunatic, would do the same thing again... On the next day on their way through Pennsylvania, they stop in Amish country. He sidles into a store and goes straight to the top shelf:

The clerk sells me a fifth of Four Roses without asking to see any ID, and by the time we stop for the night I’m drunk again.

Stephen picks up the habit pretty quickly, and it soon develops into a raging drink problem:

Ten years or so later I’m in an Irish saloon with Bill Thompson. We have lots to celebrate, not the least of which is the completion of my third book, The Shining. That’s the one which just happens to be about an alcoholic writer and ex-schoolteacher. It’s July, the night of the All-Star baseball game. Our plan is to eat a good old-fashioned meal from the dishes set out on the steam table, then get shitfaced. We begin with a couple at the bar, and I start reading all the signs. HAVE A MANHATTAN IN MANHATTAN, says one. TUESDAYS ARE TWOFORS, says another. WORK IS THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASS, says a third. And there, right in front of me, is one which reads: EARLY BIRD SPECIAL! SCREWDRIVER A BUCK MONDAY-FRIDAY 8-10 A.M. I motion to the bartender. He comes over. He’s bald, he’s wearing a gray jacket, he could be the guy who sold me my first pint back in 1966. Probably he is. I point to the sign and ask, “Who comes in at eight-fifteen in the morning and orders a screwdriver?” I’m smiling but he doesn’t smile back. “College boys,” he replies. “Just like you.”

He continues in denial, employing the world-famous Hemingway Defense:

...as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on. I can handle it. A real man always can.

Eventually, with the help of family and friends, he faces down the drink (and by then the drugs too). He debunks the idea that drinking and writing have to go together:

The idea that creative endeavor and mind altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemmingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

It’s not glamorous and not conducive to getting the written word on the page...

W Axl Rose by Mick Wall

I spotted this in the library and had an instant flashback to buying Guns N’ Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction nearly twenty two years ago. Brazenly biased and almost as self deluded as its subject matter - the band’s lead singer - W. Axl Rose is an interesting combination of rock memoir and personal grudge by a journalist whom Rose very publicly picked a fight with, telling him to “...get in the ring, motherfucker...”

The first part of the book contains a reasonably illuminating look at Rose’s home life in small town Indiana as a youth. He was frequently in trouble with the law between leaving home and moving to California, and alcohol certainly played its part:

Now living away from home, staying at his maternal grandmother’s small house, he had his first brushes with the law – mainly for misdemeanours such as ‘public consumption [of alcohol]’ and ‘disturbing the peace’... “But he would do some pretty wild things.” Axl and his friends, including Dana Gregory, “would go out and drink and do some stupid things, like smash windows along Main Street.”

Long before the acrimonious row and subsequent bad blood, Wall was writing for Kerrang! magazine, covering the rise and rise of the Rose’s band, Guns N’ Roses. He’s previously written an unauthorised biography of the band, and I can’t help feeling that a lot of it has found its way into this book. That said, the stuff about the rest of the group is far more interesting than his pontificating about the inner thoughts of Rose.

The original line up of Guns N’ Roses had a pretty heavy intake of booze and hard drugs. Inevitably, this interfered with the music and at one point it looked as if they wouldn’t even get their debut LP recorded:

In fact, early sessions eventually had to be postponed while Slash and Izzy took time off to try and rid themselves on the bad habits they had been recklessly nurturing. According to Steven, “drugs and drink” had already begun “to take their toll as Slash [was] secreted away by the label to dry out”.

The certainly made no secret of their substance abuse on the final cut of Appetite For Destruction. Track ‘Mr Brownstone’ was an ode to the ups and downs of heroin use and on the same side there was also ‘Nightrain’, a paean to the ephemeral joys of the cheap ‘bum’s wine’ it was named after – the only drink the band could regularly afford in the days before they were signed...

Wall appears to run into the band on quite a few occasions in the next few years, although how much of this has been culled from interviews is probably moot. By the time they had become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, most of the band, with the exception of Axl Rose, was apparently knocking out increasing amounts of harder and harder intoxicants. Steven Adler is reported as saying:

“Let me say for the record that I was no angel,” he told me years later. “I drank – no, scratch that – could outdrink any of the other guys in the band, including Slash (which is saying a hell of a lot). I once swallowed thirty-two kamikazes and lived to tell about it... But I never shot smack until we arrived in Amsterdam during our first European tour...

Lead guitarist Slash was the bands most visible indulger, rarely seen without a bottle of JD to hand:

I turned to speak to Slash, the only one I’d actually been introduced to. He looked like he’d just stepped off the album cover: black top hat pulled low over a waterfall of dark curls deliberately obscuring his soft brown eyes, holding on tight to a Jack Daniels bottle like a toddler clinging to its teddy. “I bet you go to bed with that thing,” I joked. “Sure,” he said, “I like to wake up to it, too. It’s the only way I can handle...” He paused and glanced around, “... I can handle this.”

As Rose begins to take a separate bus to the gigs, Slash celebrates his twenty third birthday in alcoholic style:

Slash celebrated by getting stuck into a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, rather than his usual Jack Daniels, because downing two bottles of bourbon a day was now “giving me black stripes on my tongue”.

Asked at the end of 1988 what his plans for the future were:

He stared at me through his long, corkscrew hair. “Uh, I don’t know. Right now, it’s just about getting fucked up...”

Quite. The subsequent implosion of Guns N’ Roses and Axl Rose becoming a virtual recluse for the rest of the next decade aren’t so hard to understand now...

Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willets

Describing itself as The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Dandy Julian MacLaren-Ross this extensive biography sheds light on one of the 40s most promising writers. Fêted by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh among others, MacLaren-Ross is not so well known now, perhaps because he fell from favour later in life, his talent compromised by booze and debt.


Born in South Norwood, his family moved to the French Riviera when he was young and it was there, supported by a generous monthly allowance, that he became something of a dandy in his early twenties. Back in Blighty, the money dried up and he found himself living on the charity of friends and working as a vacuum cleaner salesman. Throughout all this, he nursed a burning desire to write.

His first real successes came during the Second World War (a shortage of materials meant that short stories were never more popular). It was at this point that he started to make his way to Soho when on leave, gravitating towards the Fitzroy Tavern:

The pre-eminent meeting place in that area, sometimes called North Soho, was the Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Windmill and Charlotte Streets... It consisted of the relatively smart, L-shaped Saloon Bar, and the smaller Public Bar, the bare boards of which were strewn with saw dust... their atmosphere of raucous fraternity enhanced by music from an electric pianola and by an array of potent drinks like the peppery concoction sold as ‘Jerusalem Brandy’...

After a disastrous stint in the army, he found himself discharged in 1943 and reappeared back in London. Dressed to the nines in a trademark ‘teddy bear’ overcoat, dark glasses and a malacca cane, he once more made his way towards the familiar boozy territory west of the Tottenham Court Road.

Proudly attired in his latest get-up, his coat habitually draped round his shoulders in the style of a smooth but sinister Hollywood hoodlum, he passed the long summer evenings reacquainting himself with the riotous wartime Soho pub scene. Sometimes he went to the huge, high ceilinged Swiss Tavern on Old Compton Street, its subdued lighting lending it a murky intimacy. Normally abbreviated to ‘the Swiss’, it had a raffish ambience that made it popular with painters and writers... who didn’t mind the tarnished walls and the barman’s dirt-soiled white mess-jacket. Unable to afford pricey bottles of black-market booze, he had to rely on the normal quota of, at most, two pints of beer each night.

Supported by occasional publications and at one point full time employment working alongside Dylan Thomas (they drank together in a members bar stocked with Irish whiskey, its availability a perk of Ireland’s neutrality) MacLaren Ross slowly began his descent into the boozy caricature he was to end up:

Conscious of the Fitzroy’s associations, Julian preferred the Wheatsheaf. In the run-up to 6.00pm, he’d be waiting outside the front door. When opening-time at last arrived, he’d breeze through the Public Bar and into the Saloon Bar, always making a beeline for the extreme lefthand end of the counter, where it was easiest to get served... Finding himself in the company of devoted drinkers, nursing their precious pints, he began to increase his alcohol intake. Most of the time he drank acidic, suspiciously watery Scotch Ale, served by an ill-assorted trio of bar-staff... Apart from the way his normally unobtrusive eyelids lowered as the hours drifted by, Julian was capable of consuming any available alcohol with no tangible effect. He was so inordinately proud of this, he often used to boast about it. Slowly but steadily soaking up the booze, he’d cling tenaciously to his spot at the bar until closing-time approached. Or until the supply of beer ran out: a common occurrence on particularly busy nights in wartime pubs, where chalked signs declaring NO DRINK would spring up.

He continued writing at a tremendous rate between opening hours, staying up through the small hours with the assistance of green bombs of speed. In many respects though, his magnum opus was himself; Julian the raconteur, the ultimate writer and artist:

Bang on opening-time, Julian would make ‘his entrance, pushing the doors open with his malacca cane with the pinchbeck top. He entered, head held on high like a king, King Julian.’

After the war his writing became less sought after and he died broke in 1964. He was, as his biographer puts it, a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.

Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel by Lucinda Hawksley

An icon of the Victorian age, thanks in no small way to the portrait of her as Ophelia by John Millais, Lizzie Siddal is the tragic heroine of the Pre-Raphaelite era, the doomed wife and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the suicide dead of an overdose at the age of thirty two.


A stunner, spotted by Walter Howell Deverell while she worked in a millinery shop near Leicester Square, Lizzie started modeling for painting at the age of nineteen. She soon caught the eye of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and quickly became her muse. Unfortunately, Dante could never quite bring himself to introduce her to his family, let alone propose marriage.

Lizzie endured poor health most of her life, and although there is no precise diagnosis of what exactly it was that ailed her, the Hawksley’s biography suggests that it may well have been an eating disorder combined with bouts of depression. It wasn’t long before she began self medicating:

Whatever the original ailment was, Lizzie began alleviating it with one of the nineteenth century’s most common drugs, laudanum. It was that which was prove her downfall… Laudanum, otherwise known as “tincture of opium”, was a mixture of opium and alcohol. It was available widely and without prescription. Laudanum was perceived as a cure-all-painkiller, much as aspirin or paracetamol are viewed today.

Laudanum, still available today under strict prescription, was available without license just about anywhere. It was a panacea:

To understand why laudanum was so widely taken, one needs to look at the vast list of disparate symptoms it was claimed to alleviate. These included symptoms of alcoholism (even though alcohol was the main ingredient of the “medicine”), bedwetting, bronchitis, chilblains, cholera, coughs and colds, depression, diarrhoea, dysentery, earache, flatulence, gout, gynaecological problems, headaches, hysteria, insanity, menopause, morning sickness, muscle fatigue, nausea, nervous tension, period pains, rheumatism, stomachache, teething in babies and toothache in adults.

By the mid 1850s, Lizzie, still hanging on for an offer of marriage from Dante Gabriel, was addicted and laudanum was a constant companion in their relationship. She was no mean artist and poet herself, although her output suffered from her intake of the noxious stuff:

Her style is erratic, sometimes drawn with clarity, at other times sketchy and rough – indicative of the amount of laudanum she had taken before starting.

As the decade wore to a close, Lizzie’s illness grew worse and more life threatening. Sojourning in Matlock to take the waters, she fell desperately ill:

The years of laudanum addiction had taken hold and her symptoms were advanced and pathetic. She was unable to ingest anything without vomiting, she was weak, terribly thin and could summon up little creative energy.

Dante Gabriel came to see her and she recovered, but when he left again, fuelling her (not unjustified) suspicions that he was fooling around with other women she grew sick once more. In Hastings in 1860 she was at death’s door, and Rossetti finally married her, convinced that she wouldn’t make it to the church. Once again, she rallied, soon falling pregnant, but tragically, the baby was still-born. Lizzie was destroyed by grief:

Her usual tendency to depression, combined with a new pressure of post-natal depression, led to a dangerously increased dependence on laudanum… Rossetti later admitted that he had known her to take up to a hundred drops of laudanum in one dose.

In February 1862, Dante Gabriel went out for supper:

When he returned home at half past eleven, Rossetti found Lizzie snoring very loudly and disconcertingly. The bottle of laudanum beside the bed, which had been half-full earlier in the day, was now empty and ominously a note addressed to him was pinned to her nightgown.

The note was burned: as a suicide she would have been denied Christian burial as well as being deemed to have broken the law. As he mourned, Dante Gabriel slipped a book of poetry into her coffin before the burial. The sad coda to this tale is that seven years later, finding himself in an artistic rut, he regretted this noble act and was persuaded to have the poems exhumed.

Hawksley’s biography is a sympathetic and touching account of the tragically short life of one of the most famous faces of the 19th century; definitely one to be filed under the ‘perils and pains’...

Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

A veritable Requiem for a Twister, Fistful of Gitanes is Simmons’ homage to one of the geniuses of twentieth century pop music who died in 1991. Gainsbourg was a prolific songwriter who refused to stick to any genre, a provocateur who caused outrage with his priapic behaviour and drunken appearances on French Television, a poet and an artist, legendary in his home country, but whose reputation abroad is more of cult figure.

Born Lucien Ginsberg in 1928 to musician parents, both Jewish refugees from revolutionary Russia, Gainsbourg suffered a traumatic adolescence which saw him forced to wear a gold star in Nazi occupied Paris, and crippling stage-fright, (both in the concert halls and the bedroom), which he overcame by drinking, a habit he picked up during national service:

“Serge was the only person I’ve ever known who liked the service militaire,” said Jane [Birkin]. “He learned to drink in the army. I think, timid thing that he was, he found that if he had a little bit too much to drink he was funny – he was the one standing on the chair telling jokes whereas before he would have gone red with shyness – and that the could suddenly have chums and take a girl out without being too worried.” ... “I went into the French Army having never touched a drop of alcohol in my life,” he would later claim, “and I left 13 months later, an alcoholic.”

Starting out like his father as a nightclub piano player, success was slow for Serge. He was signed to record label Phillips but his records never sold, despite his strong song writing. As teenage rock music took over France, Serge thought he was never going to make it, then he wrote a winning song for the Eurovision Song Contest (some countries take it seriously, you know) and the French public couldn’t seem to get enough of him. By the late sixties, the charts were full of his songs and he was in the midst of an affair with Brigitte Bardot...

“There’s a trilogy in my life,” said Serge in Mort Ou Vices, “an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls – and I didn’t say isosceles, I said equilateral...”

An enthusiastic smoker (three to five packets of Gitanes a day!) as well as a drinker, Gainsbourg had his first heart-attack at 45. Not that he would let it cramp his style:

...although is doctors had warned him that cigarettes were bad for his heart; others in the medical profession had announced that drinking was good for it; so by upping the intake of one, he figured, he could cancel out the harmful effects of the other.

Gainsbourg spent the 70s with English actress Jane Birkin, with whom they had a daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. He wrote prodigious amounts of songs for her to sing, as well as for other artists and himself. His masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson was released in 1971, and he courted considerable controversy with a reggae version of the French national anthem at the end of the decade. Sadly, he was also getting increasing drunk and difficult to live with: Jane left in 1980. Gainsbourg himself, was turning into a Mr Hyde like character, his dissipated, alcoholic alter ego, Gainsbarre.

Serge himself had a wonderful phrase ready for when anyone else asked him about the Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre duality, something along the lines of fellow-drinker Tom Waits’ line about preferring “a bottle in front of me to a frontal lobotomy” but with a few added layers: “Gainsbourg se barre, Gainsbarre se bourre.” (For the non French-speakers, ‘bourre’ is pronounced like the ‘bourg’ bit of Gainsbourg. ‘Se barre’ means to cross yourself, shut yourself out or disappear, and ‘se bourre’ means to get shit-faced drunk, something usually achieved in un bar).

The effect on Gainsbourg wasn’t pretty, even if he was still producing music at a phenomenal rate:

...there was beginning to be a look of corruption about him. Like a negative image of Dorian Gray, as his work stayed fresh and invigorated, his appearance became more worn and debauched.

Rock journalist Nick Kent ran into him at a film festival in Val d’Isères:

“He looked like someone who wasn’t taking care of himself. His eyes had that bloodshot, unfocussed look of someone who was not so slowly poisoning himself with alcohol. One of the other people on the panel was staying in the room next door to Giansbourg’s suite, and he told me that every night he was awakened by Gainsbourg screaming – screaming – ‘I’m going blind!’..."

The writing was definitely on the wall. In 1989 he had another heart attack:

That year he would be in and out of the American Hospital five times. The first time, in January, the doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking he would be blind in six months and dead in twelve. “My back’s against the wall, but I don’t give a fuck,” Serge shrugged.

To his credit, he actually stayed sober for a while, after he had had two thirds of his liver removed first. Still, all was going well until he started work with teen sensation Vanessa Paradis. The stress put him straight back onto the bottle. In the ever decreasing circles of his final decline, he spent his time with old friends and lovers including Jane Birkin:

“He couldn’t stop at a petit verre – a glass or two. He had to finish the bottle. Then another bottle. And as he didn’t used to eat at midday, if you have a Pernod as your breakfast then you’re usually pretty slaughtered by tea time...”

In March 1991, the years of strong cigarettes and stronger drink finally took their toll and Serge died, one month shy of his 63rd birthday. France mourned. Difficult, sometimes impossible, outrageous, but also warm hearted and amusing as well as incredibly talented, Gainsbourg led a colourful, contradictory career that has only recently been given the appraisal it deserves outside of his native France.

What Did I Do Last Night by Tom Sykes

What Did I Do Last Night is Tom Sykes’ history of his drinking problem, starting 5,214 days before he gets sober aged thirty, the title a reference to his propensity for blackouts, or as he once puts it in the book: I’m told it was a night to remember.

A successful columnist first in London, then in New York, Sykes started on the sauce at Eton, drinking in the college bar, a cross between a tuck shop and a gin mill, and nicking wine from the housemaster’s cellar using a Heath Robinson combination of a pole, a piece of string and an umbrella. After being booted out of Eton, he goes on to a sixth form college, smoking weed and drinking even more, until eventually he ends up at Edinburgh University, chosen because the pubs opened for longer.

Edinburgh was just like me – it was either getting drunk or in the throes of a ruinous hangover.

In retrospect, it’s here that things start to go dangerously awry:

When I went to Edinburgh I was a social drinker – a heavy one, given to frequent binges, but definitely a social drinker. I could go a few days without alcohol, and when I wanted to stop I would go home to bed. But somehow, by the time I left, I had lost control. I would wake up in the mornings suffering memory loss, wondering what I had done the night before, nervous about finding out the answer, ashamed. Somewhere during those four years of indulgence I stepped off the ledge and into the deep water. I spent a lot of time later in my life trying to work out just where that point was.

Leaving university, he ends up on the Evening Standard, ideal as it was a drinkers’ newspaper, and it was largely staffed by drunks. When he leaves there in a hurry he ends up at GQ, filing highly unpredictably copy and again, drinking, smoking and snorting coke like there was no tomorrow. Inevitably, it all goes down the gurgler and he quits before he is sacked, getting a job in New York:

In most New York stories the hero arrives in Manhattan with a suitcase and a dream. I pitched up with a suitcase and a hangover.

His job on the New York Post gives him access to bars and clubs and oceans of free drink. Then he starts a bar column for the paper:

If I thought I had the greatest job in the world before, now I really did. I was the bar columnist for the New York Post. My drinking problem was no longer a liability. It was a qualification, a vocation, a career.

Two or so years of drinking continuously and ingesting prodigious amounts of toot, not to mention all the marijuana he’s smoking, finally take their toll. Sykes is convinced that the moment he realised things had finally got out of control was when he smashed up a games console in his favourite bar, pretending to be Ozzy Osbourne. My theory is that the balloon went up a few weeks before. At forty days to go until sobriety, Sykes pays a visit to the cash machine, only to be told that there are insufficient funds:

I felt sick, which was all I seemed to be feeling these days. £40,000, vapourised in two years. Where had it gone? I had drunk it, I had smoked it, I had sniffed it. I had spent my inheritance on drugs, taxis and tips. I felt blanketed in shame and stupidity.

Having laid waste to his inheritance, his days were probably numbered anyway as he couldn’t even afford the rent on the flat he shared with his wife Sasha, let alone keep up the drinking and drug taking. The incident with Pac Man in the pub leads him to the inevitable conclusion and he finds himself at an AA meeting. Apart from one relapse four days in when he finished off a half-smoked joint he found in his ashtray, Sykes has been sober since.

He expends far fewer pages on his recovery than on his revelry and I wondered a couple of times if he was ever going to give an indication if he felt he’d learnt anything from his experiences. He does however give an interesting insight into what he reckons makes an alcoholic - I'll let him have the last word:

I always remember when I thought that was what an alcoholic was – someone who had to have a drink in the morning. Over the past year, I’ve heard a better definition; that an alcoholic is someone who, once they have one drink, develops an overpowering craving for another. Now I see that is what always separated me from Sasha. She could stop.

Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia by Denise Hooker

I threatened a return visit to Fitzrovia about six months ago, and if anyone’s life encompasses the three criteria of 120 Units – pleasures, pains and perils – then it’s Nina Hamnett’s. In Denise Hooker’s revealing and poignant biography she comes across as one of the truly great characters of her age, but one whose undisputed talents were ultimately wasted by drink.

Born in 1890, Nina had a miserable childhood but her skill at drawing allowed her to escape the stifling background at home. She began exhibiting in London and hanging around in arty circles in the 1910s. The Bohemian culture in Fitzrovia was fairly well established by then. Augustus John, who knew how to put away the drink himself, was one of its denizens:

If not drinking his favourite hock and seltzer, John was known to demolish a bottle of brandy with little apparent effect and it was said that he had the drinks while his friends had the headaches.

Nina modelled for John, as well Roger Fry who admired her queer satyr-like oddity and grace, and numerous other artists, as well as painting herself. She found herself in Paris before the first world war where Modigliani introduced himself to her.

It’s a matter of conjecture as to when the wheels come off in Nina’s story, but for my money, things are on the wane by the time of her second visit to Paris in the 1920s. She is distracted more and more by the bottle, doing the rounds in Montparnasse, where:

...they drank a lethal concoction called Pernod Suze Fine, consisting of Pernod, gentian and Brandy.

Back in London, Nina embedded herself with one foot in the art word and the other firmly in its café and bar society:

Despite her need to be liked and admired, the more she gloried in her immense social success, and the more she frittered her talent in oceans of drink and casual debauchery, the clearer eyed she became about the futility of it all.

Not that it slowed her down.

By the mid thirties Nina was producing very little work beyond quick portrait sketches in pencil or chalk... Distracted by life, Nina had not been able to develop her talent and fulfil the faith that people had in her... Always willing to tell another anecdote in return for the next drink, gradually Nina Hamnett the personality, the celebrated reine de bohème, took over from the serious artist.

Nina took up residence in the corner of the bar at the Fitzroy Tavern and held court there for the best part of two decades:

On a good night, with the right company and a suitable amount of alcohol, Nina was very amusing. She was always on show, always playing to the crowd, and at her best she gave command performances. With a little too much to drink she could be disconcerting – as when she would boast that Modigliani said she had the best tits in Europe and pull up her old jersey to show them off.

After the war, the slow path to the dying of the light. Bombed out and under redevelopment, Fitzrovia was a ghost of what it once was. As was Nina:

The years immediately after the war saw the last flickering of the dying flame of Fitzrovia... More than ever Nina became a monument of a lost Bohemia and was affectionately valued as such by some, considered a boring irrelevance by others. Sitting back on her bar stool, a little drunk, she would talk straight ahead of her, barking out stories or exclamations before demanding, “Who’s going to buy me a drink?”

She made appearances in Soho as the arty crowd moved south of Oxford Street, but Nina in her last years was drunk and unpredictable, peeing on the furniture and throwing up in her handbag before staggering home to Paddington. Her second biography, Is She A Lady, was described as rambling, disjointed and inconsequential; sadly, so was Nina.

In December 1956, Nina Hamnett fell over forty feet from her window and was impaled on the railings below. The Queen of Bohemia died a few days later.

Who on Earth is Tom Baker by Tom Baker

Gloriously written, Baker’s autobiography doesn’t just cover his acting career, most famously as The Doctor, but his upbringing in Liverpool, his time as a novice monk and the incident when he tried to kill his mother-in-law by throwing a hoe at her...


The title comes from a hellish taxi ride, when the cabbie mistook him for Jon Pertwee and went on at length to slag off Tom Baker:

“What a piss artist he was, do you know he was always drunk, used to throw up all over the place. What happened to him then, Mr. Pertwee, I never see him on the box these days?”

Trying to elicit a scrap of sympathy, Baker tells the driver that the man whose reputation he is traducing has in fact passed on to his eternal reward:

“Didn’t you hear?” I said, perched only on my coccyx as I leaned forward to catch a crumb of kindness. “Didn’t you hear, he died in a basement flat in Clapham, not a pot to piss in.” And I added, to guarantee some humane response: “He’s buried over that way at Saint Michael and All the Holy Angels, Elm Road.” This invention of a parish and a road I thought was a stroke of eloquence. No Answer. And then from Charon, “What a tosspot.” Distraught for a kind obituary from him, I added, from God knows what wastepaper basket of my mind, “If you go to the grave, you can actually smell the fumes of Carlsberg Special.” And in despair, I gilded it with, “Sometimes, you can see some skint old alkie lying on the grave having a sniff.”

Baker also covers the years that he spent hanging around with the Soho Crowd. Francis Bacon, Dan Farson et al get mentions, as does Jeff Barnard, who really was ‘unwell’, from time to time:

Once when I went to see him in the Middlesex Hospital, I was shocked and frightened to see how weak he looked. He was suffering from an attack of pancreatitis, I think. It must have been an agonizing ailment to have reduced Jeff so quickly. There was a youngish doctor there who wondered if perhaps Jeff could knock off the vodka. Bravely, Jeff shook his head and the doctor sighed in admiration. “Perhaps you could cut down on it, Jeff?” he suggested. But Jeff was not to be dissuaded, “I’ve been with Sally Smirnoff too long to leave her now.”

His chapter on his antics in Soho does beg the question: why all the time in bars, clubs and pubs?

And we went on laughing and doing anything to avoid going home to those who loved us. It is a common anxiety among drinkers that they find it hard to go home. We don’t like to leave each other.

And in sad old way, he’s right...

Never a Normal Man by Daniel Farson

Daniel Farson has been dead over a decade now and was long off British Television screens by the time I was watching regularly, so it was by chance that I happened upon a reference to him online. After discovering that he used to drink (a lot) in Soho in the fifties, I decided to inquire further and got this weighty autobiography out of the library.


Written when he knew he was dying, it is incredibly frank and self deprecating, sometimes to the point of distraction, but never for too long; Never a Normal Man is a most entertaining read. It begins while he is travelling in Istanbul, wandering around looking for rough trade and getting soused on raki, the clouded silver poison which propels you into the vicious circle where you need another raki to start the day and continue to oblivion and obliteration.

Not long after his national service he started as a photographer for Picture Post. Finding himself in Soho one morning, he had his first encounter with portrait photographer and artist, John Deakin:

As I waited for the pubs to open, a new experience for me which was to be repeated for the rest of my life, I was sure that something wonderful might happen. Soho exuded optimism; it was a land of anticipation sometimes realized. A man in dark glasses tried the door of the York Minster... Following him inside as the pub opened, I watched as ordered his first drink, downed it, shivered, and sighed with heartfelt relief. “That’s better.” As the York Minster, better known as The French Pub, began to fill up, I was startled to hear friends asking each other if they need to apologize for their behaviour on the night before...

This is his introduction to a man of whom, when he arrives on a visit, Farson says:

The phrase ‘fell out of a train’ is used lightly, but Deakin did so literally.

Soho in this period was full of such characters and he made lifelong friendships with Deakin and the painter Francis Bacon. Farson became a household name from his documentary television programmes, before giving it up to run a pub, which of course, lost him a stack of money. He finished up broke and living in Devon, away from the fading lights of the West End.

I have always been a lousy drunk, wild, euphoric and abusive after that beautiful preamble, and the terrifying thing is that I have not improved in forty years. If anything it has got worse with age, he writes, describing how his career was compromised by several court appearances for being drunk and disorderly. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable autobiography by a remarkable man, now sadly vanishing from the pubic eye; the book appears to be out of print and my copy hadn’t been out of the library for a year.

Fitzrovia: London's Bohemia by Michael Bakewell

The lure of biography is hard to resist and I’ve returned to the genre with a short set of ‘character sketches’ published by the National Portrait Gallery on London’s Fitzrovia set.


West of the Tottenham Court Road and north of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia was London’s bohemian enclave in the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was also chock full of bars and drinking clubs. As Bakewell puts it in his introduction:

It was essentially a pub culture, fuelled by drink and conversation...

He also points out:

Much of the story of Fitzrovia is of talent blighted, promise unfulfilled and premature death through drink.

I’ve picked on two of the book’s characters for this entry; Dylan Thomas and Aleister Crowley. Although it was his lungs that killed him in the end, Thomas put back an astonishing amount of sauce in his time – he referred to his drinking sprees up in London from Wales as ‘capital punishment’ – and for a long time it was thought that the booze was to blame for his death at 39. He was employed by the BBC after the second world war, something they might later have had cause to regret:

As his reputation as a poet grew the talk and the drink steadily took hold and the poems grew fewer and fewer. He became increasingly unreliable, taking advances for projects that were never fulfilled. The BBC were bombarded with increasingly desperate demands: ‘ADVANCE IMMEDIATELY... I owe every tradesman in town.’

Edward Alexander ‘Aleister’ Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Baphomet’ was an occultist, magician and fraud. A sinister character, the Fitzrovians didn’t really know what to make of him. He ended his days in Hastings, and his funeral in Brighton was a blasphemous spectacular that shocked the Corporation into an edict of ‘never again’.

He employed alcohol, sex and all manner of drugs as gateways to his excursions into the astral plane. Inevitably he left behind him a trail of destruction, disciples, wives and the ‘scarlet women’ who assisted him in his conjurations were likely to end up insane or alcoholic or both.

I feel I shall be visiting this fascinating group of people again...

Spilling The Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

I first came across Clarissa Dickson Wright as one half of the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, but she has led a far more diverse life than that. She was the youngest woman ever to be called the bar and she is now a campaigner for the British countryside. Her appearance here, however, is because a long period of her life was lost to alcohol; an entry to be filed under ‘the perils’.


Until she finally sought help and found sobriety through the AA, Clarissa Dickson Wright put away a formidable amount of drink and managed to squander a generous inheritance along with a highly promising career in law. Her first encounter with strong drink, as a child in Singapore, is described with poignancy:

On the dining room sideboard stood a decanter of bright green liquid which when I tried it had a delicious peppermint taste; it was of course crème de menthe and my first taste of alcohol. Every day I took just a little which made me feel happy and dreamy...

However, it was the deaths of her mother and her beloved Clive that sent her over the edge into a decade of oblivion, which left her homeless, broke and missing several years of her life to a black void.

I asked for a large whiskey, poured myself four fingers and as I gulped it down the white light faded. Here, I suddenly realised, was the answer to everything, the key to the universe, the abatement of pain.

The writing in Spilling the Beans is tremendous, as well as painfully honest. It’s a great read that finishes on a happy note: Clarissa Dickson Wright is today happy, sober and something of a British institution. It also contains a note of caution, which I feel I must end with:

All great fun but let me give you an indication of what drink does in excess. For the start of the eighties we had a party, to which thirty people came: of those thirty ten are dead, ten are in recovery and where the others are I do not know.

Don't Try This At Home edited by Kimberley Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman

A little bit of Bank Holiday fun: Don’t Try This At Home is a collection of anecdotes from some of the biggest names in professional cooking, detailing what the blurb calls ‘culinary catastrophes’ from setting fire the kitchen to accidentally destroying the food. Naturally, there is at least one disaster involving alcohol, hence its inclusion in 120 Units.


New York chef Jimmy Bradley’s contribution to the book tells of a drunken debacle that occurred while he was working as a sous chef in a seaside restaurant on Rhode Island:

This story would never happen today. It probably could only have taken place in the 1980s, when drug and alcohol abuse in the restaurant industry were at their zenith.

Having spent four months setting up a new restaurant for their owner, Bradley and his chef Fernando (names have apparently been changed...) were looking forward to the opening night, only to find that they weren’t invited. Back at the other restaurant, resentment boiled over and Fernando decided that action had to be taken:

He began barking orders to the kitchen staff: ‘You, go get me a bucket. You, go get me three bottles of vodka and two bottles of triple sec... I’m gonna stand here and make five gallons worth of shots.’ Shots? So he was going to get hammered? Big deal. If only that were the case.

Bradley admits that ‘much of that evening is a blur to me’ after Fernando makes the entire staff knock back shot after shot. The finale occurrs when the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O comes onto the radio:

Fernando came over to my station and turned the radio up full blast. He took the wand out of my hand and started paddling an imaginary canoe... One by one, the entire staff joined in, grabbing paddles, and when those ran out, tongs, spatulas, wooden spoons...

Like a drunken conga line, the entire restaurant staff are paddling an invisible boat across the kitchen floor when the owner makes an unexpected appearance. Oddly enough Bradley and Fernando were looking for a new job the next day.

Wine and War by Don & Petie Kladstrup

Subtitled ‘The French, the Nazis and the battle for France’s Greatest Treasure’, Wine & War chronicles the story of the France’s most famous vineyards while the country was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. The book was another recommendation, this time from my friend Liam who works in the wine industry and lent me his copy.


After invading France in 1940, the Nazi’s set about systematically looting the country. Many millions of bottles were taken back to Germany at the behest of Göring, and at the end of the war the French liberated what was left from an immense cache at Berchtesgaden.

The authors make the point that wine and viticulture are very much part of the French soul and that the crime of its theft was particularly hard to bear, especially when it was eventually rationed for the ordinary French in the latter years of the war. In a particularly moving episode, winemaker Gaston Huet, then a prisoner of war in Germany, manages to persuade the camp commandant to allow the men to have a fête, complete with wine, although when the wine is shared out, there is little more than a tiny glass each.

Huet did not remember precisely what wine he drank or the vintage. “It was nothing special and there was only a thimbleful,” he said, “but it was glorious, and the best wine I ever drank.”

I shall leave the final word to the writer Georges Duhamel, who after a dinner to celebrate the end of the war and the return of the vineyards to French control said:

“Wine was one of the first signs of civilisation to appear in the life of human beings. It is in the Bible, it is in Homer, it shines through all the pages of history, participating in the destiny of ingenious men. It gives spirit to those who know how to taste it, but it punishes those who drink it without restraint.”

Falling Towards England by Clive James

We devoured this, along with the earlier Unreliable Memoirs on a family holiday back in the 80s. James was a fixture on the telly by that point and was drafted in by the Beeb to do New Year’s Eve several years running as well as hosting his own show. He is a genuinely funny writer as well as a great mind, in my opinion, and although I laughed more reading the first book, volume two is still a hoot.


Its inclusion on the booze blog is for the following episode, where James attempts to get a job in the wine trade. Given that his idea of fine wine was “one that merely stained the teeth without stripping off the enamel” it was an interesting proposition but the interview is far from a success. He bluffs his way through at the beginning but it soon starts to go wrong.

My mumbled generalisations got me as far as the bar, but there he poured a glass of yellowish white wine and asked me to taste it. “This is a 1960 Trockenbocken hock from Schlockenglocken,” he rapped, or words to that effect. “Selling it through my club for a quid a bottle. What do you think?” I sniffed it, said it had a nice nose, sipped it, said it had a nice bottom, and sank the rest of it in one. “You know bugger all about wines,” announced T H Lawrence matter-of-factly.

After reading that, the phrase ‘bugger all’ got overused that summer...