Brand - Booky wook 2: this time its personal

Dont bend; dont water it down; dont try to make it logical; dont 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 Im still waiting, its 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 Mosss 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 youll like fame? You wont be able to go to supermarkets.

Oh, please! I mockingly responded. No more supermarkets? Next youll be telling me Ill 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 theyll 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 Pestilences ragged arms, and Death will go to his grave (sent by whom, well 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 theres no tomorrow and once they turn up there wont 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 hell 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 wasnt predestined.

Thats the thing about destiny, you can question it but you cannot undo it once it has occurred. Thats what that lunatic Schrdinger 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 couldve made the same point with a mouse and a Tic Tac. I think the real question is, what is this grudge that Schrdinger has against cats? Whats his next experiment? Schrdingers electric litter tray? Schrdingers ball of wool in a shark-infested swamp? I may conduct an experiment named Russells pointy boot in which I repeatedly kick Schrdinger 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 didnt 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 Schrdinger, but first I will tell you what its 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 werent entirely impartial observers, not folk stood passive on the sidelines with pads and pens peering over half-moon specs, in fact it wasnt 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 doesnt have the same ubiquitous potency now, which is another of the inconveniences that Ive 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 Im alright, Jack, pull the ladder up if we cant get the ladder up simply shatter the rungs so these techno-johnny-come-latelys get splinters in their grasping palms. Now that would be ungracious fame should be available to all who crave its dubious kiss. Lets have a fame democracy where fame is available to all. I dont think for a full Warholian fifteen minutes, thats excessive. Just a highlights package.

I often query the significance of sexuality in my pursuit of success. Is the reappropriation of biological drive the engine of ambition? Is that whats compelling me forward? Whats getting me out of bed in the morning? Back into bed at night? Is that whats keeping me in bed hour after hour with strangers, exchanging the baton of my lust as they pass beneath the sheets in the relay of my needs? Olympic promiscuity. The carnal flame forever burning.

I encountered Kate Moss for the first time as a result of my appearance on Jonathan Ross. Sadie Frost, a long-time friend and a very sweet, beautiful woman, informed me of the development that even as it was issued seemed to have strayed into my mind as a fanciful refugee discarded from romantic fiction for implausibility.

Oh, I was talking to Kate the other day and shed like to meet you.

I was not yet the kind of person to hear the words Kate wants to meet you and immediately assume Well, that must be Kate Moss. I would just think someone called Kate, like one of the thousand Kates one might bump into walking down Croydon High Street. Not canonised Kate, not the Kate who can only be squinted at lest her radiance shreds your mortal retinas, not the Kate whod had God present at her conception, ushering through the holy sperm to the sainted ovum, where the orgasmic cries of her parents harmonised with the salutations of the choiring cherubim.

Obviously you remember the prettiest girl in your school. Her sweeping majesty, her ethereal glow, how the playground floor did not dare besmirch her gentle feet with its lowly asphalt touch but instead protectively hummed so she might hover above you, above me, above us for she was never meant to walk among such as we but was sent that we might know that there are higher things. Kate Moss is the prettiest girl in all our schools. Like they imposed an involuntary global pageant. Behold our queen, but dont look at her directly or all else you gaze upon till death brings down your lids will be as shadows compared to her beauty.