Post by delamitri on Oct 13, 2007 10:19:17 GMT -5
This is Justin speaking this time:
Having forged a long and illustrious career as a failed rock singer it will come as no surprise to the reader that I have crossed paths with a great variety of fascinating (and more celebrated than myself) individuals. As I thought some of these vignettes, if you will, might make interesting reading to those of you not so blessed with such access to the airport and hotel corridors of international fabulousness (you are the little people - face it) I here list a few of these encounters for your sad, frantic perusal. Prepare, friends, to be agog.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
I met Winston (middle name Ono - how many people know that?) during a brief break in my world tour of 1986. I was holed up in the legendary Sebel Townhouse Hotel in Sydney waiting for a fresh trio of backing vocalists to arrive from LA after the first lot drowned when I espied his rotund and (by then) rather pathetic figure feverishly smoking cigarettes in the doorway of the fire escape. We got to talking (mainly about the the films of Bruce Lee as I recall) and I was honoured to be invited to his penthouse suite for a cream tea with Phil Collins from Genesis. Of course the cream tea soon turned into a libation of a more lively sort and before long Winston was crying and wailing something about tennis elbow and demanding that I leave. I remember saying goodbye (in Italian) and noticing a dried up wasp stuck to his trouser zipper. Looking back, I can see it as an ill portent of what was to become that most tragic of downfalls.
NELSON MANDELA
I was fortunate enough to meet the great African democrat (middle name Prince - how many people know that?) when we were both engaged to speak at the same conference for the UK Steam Association. After our speeches we were invited to participate in some of the more fun events such as water boiling and filthy sex parties where we bonded over a bottle of bourbon or two. At breakfast the following morning we said our farewells and I remember clearly, kissed one another quite roughly.
MICK HUCKNALL
The flame-haired chanteur (middle name Mick - how many people know that?) was always a favourite of mine - from his show-stopping impressions of Sam Cooke to his later experimental period (when I always thought he was impersonating a calf being beaten with a stick)- so I was taken aback to meet him during a tour of Japan in the mid-nineties having been quite separately invited by the Prime Minister to a display of waxworks in an old radio factory. We quickly adjourned and made for the nearest bar where Mick regaled me with stories about beating Bobby Charlton at football and head-butting the Queen. A great quantity of saki was imbibed before he showed me his thingy which was as long and slender as an uncoiled tapeworm and adorned with a tattoo of a Ferrari.
SUZI QUATRO
In the very early eighties I underwent treatment for prescription painkillers (I had been taking twenty paracetamol a week from the age of fifteen) and spent a good part of the spring of eighty one in a treehouse in Dorset undergoing intensive shouting therapy which mainly involved being bellowed at by hippies on the ground. Suzi, (middle name Formaggio - how many people know that?) who had herself struggled so manfully with dependence issues, was by that time a qualified councillor. I cannot overstate the significance of the advice she gave me there (suffice to say that without it I might not be writing these grateful words now) and upon my discharge from the facility she even took me down the pub and got me slaughtered. My memories of that night are admittedly vague but it must have been rather wonderful judging by the photograph of the two of us sitting here upon my writing desk, for we are wearing each other's clothes! Sadly I had to give her the leather jacket and fishnets back. And the pants.
ALEX JAMES
I once spent a lovely summer in a farmhouse in the Dordogne with Kate Bush and the infant Alex James from Blur. He was a chatty little thing but before long we were driven to smother him with a pillow when he wouldn't stop going on about cheese.
BRYAN ADAMS
I once bumped into Bryan Adams in a lift but he was such a forgettable little pipsqueak that I have nothing further to say.
DEREK OUT OF DEREK AND THE DOMINOES
It is a widely held misconception that 'Derek' of the Dominoes was none other than Peter Hooton from The Farm but I can categorically state here that it was Eric Clapton out of Cream. I know because during the long hot summer of '76 we shared a toilet in a small campsite near Ludlow. Eric (whose middle name is Percy, I believe - how many...oh, fuck it) was there with his family working on songs for his next solo album and was so grateful to me for lending him some Head and Shoulders that he insisted I stay with him and his wife and three geese in his tent. In actual fact I am bored shitless of writing this tosh while I sit on a packed train from New York to D.C. and if you are one of the four people to have read this far we may as well abandon all hope and kill ourselves. Let's make a pact - we'll all do it with shards of broken cd jewel cases on the next full moon - that should screw with the papers. Let's all leave a note written in human feces that reads TEDDY BEAR REDDY BEAR WHERE IS DENNIS? and stick it to our foreheads with adhesive tape decorated with characters from The Simpsons. Come on - it'd be a laugh.
THE DRUMMER FROM KISS
I slept with the drummer from Kiss for six years. And then I woke up all rotten with glitter and theatrical glue. My beard was blue and his bed was round, I ran for my life to a coastal town, got a job as a lag in a public loo, met a girl with a leg in a built-up shoe, made a name for myself as an ice-cream man with a truck painted white and its tyres painted black, you could see all the kids stuck in the slick of its tracks from the picture window, tastefully arched, I built at the back.
Having forged a long and illustrious career as a failed rock singer it will come as no surprise to the reader that I have crossed paths with a great variety of fascinating (and more celebrated than myself) individuals. As I thought some of these vignettes, if you will, might make interesting reading to those of you not so blessed with such access to the airport and hotel corridors of international fabulousness (you are the little people - face it) I here list a few of these encounters for your sad, frantic perusal. Prepare, friends, to be agog.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
I met Winston (middle name Ono - how many people know that?) during a brief break in my world tour of 1986. I was holed up in the legendary Sebel Townhouse Hotel in Sydney waiting for a fresh trio of backing vocalists to arrive from LA after the first lot drowned when I espied his rotund and (by then) rather pathetic figure feverishly smoking cigarettes in the doorway of the fire escape. We got to talking (mainly about the the films of Bruce Lee as I recall) and I was honoured to be invited to his penthouse suite for a cream tea with Phil Collins from Genesis. Of course the cream tea soon turned into a libation of a more lively sort and before long Winston was crying and wailing something about tennis elbow and demanding that I leave. I remember saying goodbye (in Italian) and noticing a dried up wasp stuck to his trouser zipper. Looking back, I can see it as an ill portent of what was to become that most tragic of downfalls.
NELSON MANDELA
I was fortunate enough to meet the great African democrat (middle name Prince - how many people know that?) when we were both engaged to speak at the same conference for the UK Steam Association. After our speeches we were invited to participate in some of the more fun events such as water boiling and filthy sex parties where we bonded over a bottle of bourbon or two. At breakfast the following morning we said our farewells and I remember clearly, kissed one another quite roughly.
MICK HUCKNALL
The flame-haired chanteur (middle name Mick - how many people know that?) was always a favourite of mine - from his show-stopping impressions of Sam Cooke to his later experimental period (when I always thought he was impersonating a calf being beaten with a stick)- so I was taken aback to meet him during a tour of Japan in the mid-nineties having been quite separately invited by the Prime Minister to a display of waxworks in an old radio factory. We quickly adjourned and made for the nearest bar where Mick regaled me with stories about beating Bobby Charlton at football and head-butting the Queen. A great quantity of saki was imbibed before he showed me his thingy which was as long and slender as an uncoiled tapeworm and adorned with a tattoo of a Ferrari.
SUZI QUATRO
In the very early eighties I underwent treatment for prescription painkillers (I had been taking twenty paracetamol a week from the age of fifteen) and spent a good part of the spring of eighty one in a treehouse in Dorset undergoing intensive shouting therapy which mainly involved being bellowed at by hippies on the ground. Suzi, (middle name Formaggio - how many people know that?) who had herself struggled so manfully with dependence issues, was by that time a qualified councillor. I cannot overstate the significance of the advice she gave me there (suffice to say that without it I might not be writing these grateful words now) and upon my discharge from the facility she even took me down the pub and got me slaughtered. My memories of that night are admittedly vague but it must have been rather wonderful judging by the photograph of the two of us sitting here upon my writing desk, for we are wearing each other's clothes! Sadly I had to give her the leather jacket and fishnets back. And the pants.
ALEX JAMES
I once spent a lovely summer in a farmhouse in the Dordogne with Kate Bush and the infant Alex James from Blur. He was a chatty little thing but before long we were driven to smother him with a pillow when he wouldn't stop going on about cheese.
BRYAN ADAMS
I once bumped into Bryan Adams in a lift but he was such a forgettable little pipsqueak that I have nothing further to say.
DEREK OUT OF DEREK AND THE DOMINOES
It is a widely held misconception that 'Derek' of the Dominoes was none other than Peter Hooton from The Farm but I can categorically state here that it was Eric Clapton out of Cream. I know because during the long hot summer of '76 we shared a toilet in a small campsite near Ludlow. Eric (whose middle name is Percy, I believe - how many...oh, fuck it) was there with his family working on songs for his next solo album and was so grateful to me for lending him some Head and Shoulders that he insisted I stay with him and his wife and three geese in his tent. In actual fact I am bored shitless of writing this tosh while I sit on a packed train from New York to D.C. and if you are one of the four people to have read this far we may as well abandon all hope and kill ourselves. Let's make a pact - we'll all do it with shards of broken cd jewel cases on the next full moon - that should screw with the papers. Let's all leave a note written in human feces that reads TEDDY BEAR REDDY BEAR WHERE IS DENNIS? and stick it to our foreheads with adhesive tape decorated with characters from The Simpsons. Come on - it'd be a laugh.
THE DRUMMER FROM KISS
I slept with the drummer from Kiss for six years. And then I woke up all rotten with glitter and theatrical glue. My beard was blue and his bed was round, I ran for my life to a coastal town, got a job as a lag in a public loo, met a girl with a leg in a built-up shoe, made a name for myself as an ice-cream man with a truck painted white and its tyres painted black, you could see all the kids stuck in the slick of its tracks from the picture window, tastefully arched, I built at the back.
