As a result, I’m probably the only British musician of the sixties who went to work on the Reeperbahn and came back still in possession of his virginity.
Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find things liven up quite considerably.
There was a funny little guy we knew who – in keeping with the flower-power mood of the times – had changed his name to Hans Christian Anderson. The aura of fairy tale otherworldliness conjured by this pseudonym was slightly punctured when he opened his mouth and a thick Lancashire accent came out. Eventually he changed his first name back to Jon and became the lead singer of Yes.
You get up in the morning after you’ve slept with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: ‘Why have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?’ It’s just weird. It really takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss.
I worked really hard, maybe too hard, but it felt like there was an unstoppable momentum behind me that carried me on no matter how exhausted I was, that drove me through any kind of setback.
One song, ‘All The Nasties’, was about me, wondering aloud what would happen if I came out publicly: ‘If it came to pass that they should ask – what would I tell them? Would they criticize behind my back? Maybe I should let them’. Not a single person seemed to notice what I was singing about.
It’s hard to see how I could have been given a clearer warning that this was a bad idea unless it had started raining brimstone and I’d been visited by a plague of boils.
But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days.
Every time I caught Dee’s eye – wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as ridiculous as ever – I had a fit of the giggles.
Keith had basically died from an incurable case of being Keith Moon.
Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she’d ever worked with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.
Then again, if I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and punch someone in the face, it might as well be John Reid; he could take it as payback for thumping me when we were a couple.
Far from being reassured, our fellow safari-goers – dressed in a way more befitting the climate – kept passing troubled glances our way, as if the safari party had been joined by a couple of maniacs.
Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just happened.
It’s worth pointing out that Renate didn’t just marry a gay drug addict. That would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life was about to go haywire in ways he hadn’t previously thought possible. I.
Mine was just an ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows. It didn’t seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park.
But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on homosexuals.
When I told him what I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell.
You can work as hard as you like, and plan as carefully as you want, but there are moments when it’s just about a hunch, about trusting your instincts, or about fate.
You know, I’ve got 1,000 candles in a closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I’ll tell you what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.