North Face of Soho
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Covering my role in the sweep of history from the late sixties to the early eighties, the fourth volume of my unreliable memoirs, North Face of Soho, came out in hardback from Picador in late 2006. For the first time, I went on the road with a one-man show based on a specific book, and I did 32 one-night stands around England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, reading less and less from the book all the way as I piled on more and more incidental commentary. But something like the full text was read out for a Picador talking book on CDs and I also recited extensive excerpts for a BBC radio serialisation.
There is one more volume of autobiography, The Blaze Of Obscurity, which covers my television years from 1982 to the millennium. |
Extract
"On the day I resigned from the show, Mike and Dave promised me a present for that evening. When they arrived at Gibson Square, they had the present in a flute case. Reverently they opened the lid. Inside, lying in a trough of worn blue velvet, was what they told me was the World’s Biggest Joint. The flute case could have been a suitcase and the super-joint would still have been prominent. In the context of its modest container, it looked majestic, like a zeppelin. Mike and Dave, guiding their creation out of its hangar, assured us that the calculations for building it had been precise: this was as long and fat a joint could be without collapsing under its own weight. Much of the weight, it was explained, consisted of the active ingredient, sprinkled on the loose tobacco to a density never previously achieved by man. “You have to imagine,” murmured Dave, “a car-park full of tumbleweed, and then there’s this rain of shit.” They bent close over their masterpiece. Mike’s voice came, as always, from a distance. “We make these all the time,” he mumbled. “But this is the biggest.” Dave lit a match.
If this book were pure fiction, I could say that my encounter with the super-joint marked the end of my period of Experimenting With Drugs."
If this book were pure fiction, I could say that my encounter with the super-joint marked the end of my period of Experimenting With Drugs."