Star Blog

Had some very nice emails today from readers. Must be getting old, it was always hate mail when I was young. The first from Lawrence Paterson (he doesn't say where he's from) congratulating me on my book Paranoid. Says that despite reading it and 'seeing the shallowness of the scene' he is still 'hanging on to the dream of a musical career'. There's nothing wrong with that Lawrence. It's the tossers still hanging on to the nightmare of their musical careers that need putting out of their misery.

Then one from someone called Damian (again doesn't say where from) this time about Star Trippin'. He says it 'took me back to the mid-80s wearing daft clothes and looking a right sight'. Then ends by saying: 'You and Ross Halfin seem to be two of the funniest fuckers on the planet'. Well, I can confirm that Ross is definitely one funny fucker all right - in every sense. When we used to travel the world together there were some nights I used to lie in my hotel bed laughing so hard at something he'd said or done that day that I literally couldn't sleep. There were also nights of course when I used to lay cowering under the sheets over something he'd done or said - but it was always worth it. He's a dangerous man, Ross. Says what he thinks. An almost unheard of personality disorder in the rock biz.

Finally, got one from Juan Carlos Perez from This Is Rock magazine in Spain, saying he wants to review Star Trippin'. Says my stories have been 'an inspiration' for 'decades'. Thank you, Juan. You have made an old man feel...old.

Now I have to go. I can hear the kids screaming in the bath as my wife tries to drown them. This means it must be nearly dinner time - the most important time of the day for me since I quit the booze and the drugs. In fact I'm thinking of writing a book about it - Stir Fry High. It'll get you right off, man...

Bank holiday Monday. Should have been out with the wife and kids, traipsing round Cotswold Wildlife Park. But rain stopped play and instead I've been trying to pick the tracks I'm going to play on this Planet Rock show they've asked me to do.

They're meant to both reflect my musical taste (as long as it's rock, they added) and trigger a few good stories I can tell about the buggers that made the music. So I start with a list comprised of tracks entirely from the bands featured in Star Trippin'. Then sit there looking at it asking myself if I really want to play Motley Crue and Poison. I cross them off the list (along with Bon Jovi and a couple of others) and begin again by asking myself what I'm actually into these days. Find myself writing down names like Fairport Convention ('Who Knows Where The Time Goes') and Pink Floyd (anything off 'Dark Side Of The Moon'). Would add a bit of Miles Davis and Mozart too but I don't suppose they're quite rock enough.

Which reminds me... got the new issue of Mojo in the post over the weekend. I've got nothing in there as usual because I only know about heavy metal obviously and they don't do much of that. Instead they've got someone called the Beatles on the cover. I wonder who they are. Bet they're not as good as Iron Maiden.

Also saw the new issue of Classic Rock - though I didn't get sent that, never having been able to get on the mailing list. Well, why should I? I only gave most of the staff their jobs. Got a very good picture of Jon Bon Jovi on the cover taken by Ross Halfin, the finest rock photographer that ever drew breath. Check out his website too, it's much better than this one - www.rosshalfin.co.uk

Meanwhile a French magazine has emailed to ask if I would like to write a Guns N' Roses story for them, about their latest gigs in New York, which I happen to know quite a lot about, having snuck through the backdoor. Was very disappointed they didn't play 'Get In The Ring' in my honour, but then was pretty disappointed by the whole thing, actually. But hey, it's not really Guns N' Roses, is it? Despite what the poor deluded bastards who scream otherwise say. I mean, if Paul McCartney got a bunch of nobodies together tomorrow and called it the Beatles, would it mean it was the Beatles? (Whoever they are...)

Long dull day finishing my incredibly brilliant Bruce Springsteen piece. At least it's done. Then spent an hour on the phone with Gerry trying to figure out why these blog entries are full of glitches when you view the site on an Apple Mac. (Looks fine viewed from a PC - go figure.) At the end of it we still don't know. But we have figured out a way to work it so the glitches no longer appear. I hope you Mac users are happy.
Spent the evening eating pizza (a cardinal sin if you're trying to lose weight which I'm supposed to be) and watching Doctor Who with the kids. Some parents wont let their kids watch Doctor Who until they're, like, 15. We say fuck that, they can always hide behind the back of the couch, which is what I did when I was five and look at me, no harm done whatsoever, doc...
Finally got them to bed still twitching then Linda and I watched Meet The Fokkers on Sky Movies. It was OK. Probably better seeing it on a plane. One of those.
All in all, another wild Saturday night here at rock'n'roll HQ. I'm off to bed now to cream my wife's tattoo. Not as exciting as it sounds but at least I get to sleep with a woman, which is more than can be said for most so-called rock writers...

Sarah Crowley from South Carolina (great name, weird place) emails to ask: ‘What is a normal day for you?’ Presumably she means ‘normal’ as in what do I actually do for a living, as opposed to the bits (often quite long bits) when I’m surrounded by screaming children (I have three small screamers) wanting sweets-drinks-wees-toys-telly-music-teddies-et-god-help-me-cetera. Or my wife wanting tattoos, or a new car, or a very long rambling conversation about what the other mums and dads she meets on the school-run are all doing (because, obviously, I’m really interested). Working from home can be a real treat like that.

To try and answer the question, though…Well, Sarah, I don’t really know what ‘normal day’ means anymore. Not because I am, like, so rock’n’roll, but because I am so over-forty-ragged-around-the-edges that all days tend to blur into one for me. I just checked my diary for any possible highlights and discovered that this week, for example, I spent Monday driving for two hours through torrential rain for a meeting with a publishing company that wants to get into making tour programmes. In this case, I am acting as a ‘consultant’. My reward: a working lunch of fish-finger sandwich and orange juice, followed by 15-minutes of blather about what-great-tour-programmes-they’re-gonna-be and another two-hour drive home again.

Tuesday found me taking the train to London where I was interviewed for hours for a Bon Jovi TV documentary. Found myself racking my brains to answer such penetrating questions as, “Why was ‘Tokyo Road’ such an important track for them?” To which I reply, in my role as ‘expert’: “Um, which one was ‘Tokyo Road’ again?” Turns out it’s one of the tracks from their rubbish second album (the mega-flop) but the TV company have “some great footage” of them doing it live in Japan so want to include it. Oh, right…

Wednesday I was actually here in my office working, supposedly on a long, rambling piece about Bruce Springsteen I’ve agreed to do for someone (in no way just for the money, obviously), but in reality answering queries about Star Trippin’ from various unexpected places. Rolling Stone in Germany want a copy for review. Cool, never had a review of one of my books there before. Planet Rock asks if they can give away copies of it in a competition and have me on for a sort of Desert Island Discs thing. Cool, yeah, fancy that – immediately go looking for it on the internet. Gerry my brother publisher calls to say Amazon want copies to sell too. Yeah, all right, but no signed copies and at the proper price – unlike this site where you get three quid off and a signed copy. And so on and so forth. This goes on for hours. At the end of it I have not written one word on Bruce Springsteen…

Thursday found me back in London where my wife has driven me at gunpoint. She WILL have that tattoo, fuck Bruce Springsteen! We go to George Bone’s in Hanwell – greatest tattooist in the world, no arguments allowed. His wife Pat makes me a cup of tea while I sit there watching George put the drill into the small of Linda’s back. The whole thing takes over two hours but at the end of it my wife has a piece of art on her back and I’m actually pleased for her. Takes us another two hours to drive home through the traffic, by which time I’ve gone insane and decide to mow the grass in our front garden. We have had non-stop rain for about two-weeks and it is about a foot tall, so really needs doing. But that’s not what gets me out there. It’s the thought of having to sit down and work on Brucie baby. When I finally get back to the office and turn on the computer there are dozens more Star Trippin’ enquiries so decide to do that first. Post my first blog. Then go to bed where my wife screams because I have touched her back with my elbow.

Which brings us to today, Friday – designated Bruce Springsteen Day in my office. Except I find myself reading an email from someone called Sarah Crowley from South Carolina (weird name, great place) asking me what a normal day is. Maybe I’ll try and answer it tomorrow…

I hadn’t intended to do a blog but this whole Star Trippin’ book-website-thing has begun to take on such a life of its own – so many people have come out of the woodwork because of it, musicians, media-people, readers, old friends, old enemies – that I now feel obliged to comment in some way. So for as long as it lasts I’ll try and keep this going.

I admit, I’ve been taken aback at the force of some of the reactions it’s received – particularly, of course, from those people that read Kerrang! back in the 1980s. So many emails from readers all over the world crying into their beer over what a shame it is that the mag doesn’t exist in its original, freewheeling form anymore. But then rock music doesn’t exist in that way anymore, either. It’s not the fault of the present Kerrang! team that the era they represent is so different from the one me and the original team came to personify. Rock is hardly the only thing that’s changed over the past 20 years. And when I say ‘readers from all over the world’ I mean exactly that. More than 75 percent of the people that have bought the book so far come from outside the UK – often from quite far away indeed. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, USA, Canada, Italy, Belgium, France, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Ireland… the power of the internet, eh? But how did all these people manage to get Kerrang! in the ’80s?

Then are those that plainly never picked up a copy of Kerrang! in their lives but just liked the look of the book, or had read some of my other books. A 20-year-old from Dublin named Danny emailed me last week to say the following: ‘I bought this because I wanted to know more about these classic bands. Having read it, I now want to know why I can’t read classic stories like this anymore. Not just in Kerrang! but in any of the so-called rock mags. Why did you stop?’

Well, Danny from Dublin, I didn’t stop. But what happened next is too big a subject to get into here, except to say that none of us – me or the bands I used to write about back then – look and feel the same way about anything these days. Or if they do they’re in deep trouble. There’s a bigger story to tell there maybe but that’s not what this book is about.

Another comment I got, this time from a magazine editor, was that the book would have been better if I had re-written all the stories. I know what he means but then he was never a Kerrang! reader and just doesn’t understand. This isn’t meant to be a collection of thought-out pieces detailing my feelings now about the bands that shook the world back then, but a reasonably accurate depiction of the stuff that was actually written and published at the time, cobblers and all. More than anything, for me the stories reflect the personality of the magazine back then, and for those of us that were familiar with that background, that style, it would have been utterly meaningless to have tried to ‘improve’ on that now. What for? Again, that’s a different type of book you’re talking about altogether. One I may yet write, but not this time.

Gerry my brother publisher has asked that I give this blog a certain diary aspect too, which I will try and do. Like, today it rained – all day. And I spent most of it paying bills and replying to emails – and avoiding my wife who keeps bothering me about wanting a tattoo (she’s the same age I was when I wrote the stories in Star Trippin’ so you have to forgive her… sort of). But that’s all I can manage for now. I want this to be a blog you can jump in and out of quickly, not a long daily essay you need to swot up on for a test later. More weather reports tomorrow. Maybe…