For Katy.

      This is my past.

      You are my future.

       Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

      Charles Baudelaire

       Have faith in Allah but always tie your camel up.

      John Noel

      Contents

       Title Page

      Epigraph

      Part One

      Chapter 1 - Like a Rolling Stone

      Chapter 2 - New Musical Expletive

      Chapter 3 - Big Brother’s Big Risk

      Chapter 4 - Enter Sandman

      Chapter 5 - Digital Manipulation

      Chapter 6 - No Means NOooo

      Chapter 7 - Take Me to Your Leader

      Chapter 8 - The Happiest Place on Earth

      Chapter 9 - Human Yoghurt

      Part Two

      Chapter 10 - Seriously, Do You Know Who I Am?

      Chapter 11 - Hawaii Not?

      Chapter 12 - It’s What He Would’ve Wanted

      Chapter 13 - Hey Pluto!

      Picture Section

      Part Three

      Chapter 14 - They Never Forget

      Chapter 15 - Come on, Darling, We’re Leaving

      Chapter 16 - Opportunity Sucks

      Chapter 17 - He’s from Barcelona

      Part Four

      Chapter 18 - Mummy Helen

      Chapter 19 - The Last Autograph

      Chapter 20 - Boner Fido

      Chapter 21 - Bottle Rocket

      Picture Section

      Acknowledgements

      Permissions

      Copyright

       About the Publisher

      Part One

       Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

      Franz Kafka

       If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.

      Jean-Paul Sartre

      Chapter 1

       Like a Rolling Stone

      Fame was bequeathed to me by the lips of an angel. After all my years of rancid endeavour, I was granted fame by Kate Moss’s kiss.

      I was born to be famous, but it took decades for me to convey this entitlement to an indifferent world and suspicious job centres – both presumed me a nitwit, possibly with good reason as I was brilliantly disguised as a scruff-bag. Being anonymous was an inconvenience to me.

      My well-meaning chum John Rogers would offer kindly, useless consolations – “Do you think you’ll like fame? You won’t be able to go to supermarkets.”

      “Oh, please!” I mockingly responded. “No more supermarkets? Next you’ll be telling me I’ll be incessantly pestered by sex-thirsty harlots yearning to massage me out of my agony. That vainglorious sycophants will clamour to yawp odes of awe and wonder into my wealthy fizzog while fertile accolades and praise will avalanche the fields of my barren esteem, where now only bedraggled ravens hungrily drum the wretched dirt.” I really wanted recognition.

      The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse signify oncoming Armageddon, which must be awful for their confidence – everywhere those dread riders canter they’ll be greeted with shrieks and condemnation. Not even the most generous spinster will welcome Famine with a piece of Battenberg and a cuppa. No rosy-faced little match girl will leap into Pestilence’s ragged arms, and Death will go to his grave (sent by whom, we’ll have to ponder) without ever tasting the kiss of a willing debutante. Yet, like the Royals, the Horsemen continue their grim duty as living signs, harbingers. Harbinging like there’s no tomorrow – and once they turn up there won’t be.

      The harbingers of my fame were far more glamorous and perhaps yet more iconic. These were the signifiers that my life sentence in the penitentiary of anonymity was, at last, coming to an end. The first Horseman was Jonathan Ross, a moniker he’ll welcome as it subtly alludes to his truly equine cockleberry. My appearance on the chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross in 2006 flung me into the orbit of celebrity from where I could gather momentum. It was also the commencement of my most notorious public friendship. For just three years later Jonathan and I were to become the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of broadcasting when, accidentally, we nearly destroyed the greatest public service institution on Earth, the BBC. When reflecting on monumental, life-defining events I marvel at the ineluctable journey that led to them. From the moment Jonathan and I met we were destined to share this extraordinary experience, so retrospectively the preceding events garner additional significance. Perhaps the scandal that we inadvertently conjured wasn’t predestined.

      That’s the thing about destiny, you can question it but you cannot undo it once it has occurred. That’s what that lunatic Schrödinger was up to with his cat – a scientist, of all things, in analysing the nature of the known, put a cat into a sealed box with a poisoned tin of food, arguing that until the box was reopened two potential realities existed simultaneously; one where the cat was alive and another where it had eaten the food and died. What a bastard. He could’ve made the same point with a mouse and a Tic Tac. I think the real question is, what is this grudge that Schrödinger has against cats? What’s his next experiment? Schrödinger’s electric litter tray? Schrödinger’s ball of wool in a shark-infested swamp? I may conduct an experiment named Russell’s pointy boot in which I repeatedly kick Schrödinger in the nuts to examine whether his scrotum could be used to shine shoes. Regardless, perhaps there is an alternate reality in which Jonathan and I didn’t leave Manuel from Fawlty Towers a message that very nearly destroyed the corporation that created that wonderful show. Later we will examine that barmy event with the cruel scrutiny of that swine-hunt Schrödinger, but first I will tell you what it’s like to be plucked from a life of hard drugs and petty crime and rocketed into the snugly carcinogenic glare of celebrity.

      I was nervous before going on that Jonathan Ross show. As it turned out, some people said – and they weren’t entirely impartial observers, not folk stood passive on the sidelines with pads and pens peering over half-moon specs, in fact it wasn’t even “people”, it was a person – my dad. He said it was as significant as when Billy Connolly went on Parky, becoming in that instant a national star – as you know Connolly has never descended from that firmament. Television doesn’t have the same ubiquitous potency now, which is another of the inconveniences that I’ve been stuck with: the availability of technology means that any prat can nick a Mac, record their voice, broadcast it and become an internet sensation before getting their own TV and radio show. Well, in my day TV and radio shows were hard won. More than ever I understand the phrase “I’m alright, Jack,