Whilst in Denver, Colorado, Johnny and I attend a concert by A-ha, whom we have met previously and whom we quite like. The hall is rammed with very small females who squeal at an intolerable volume throughout the concert, drowning out all of the songs. Because of this, the night is a mess. While it's true that girls screamed at Sparks, there was something utterly pointless about the high-pitched mass squeal that blanketed the hall for A-ha. There was hardly any necessity for the band to actually play. Backstage, A-ha are gracious. They are healthy and athletic and inherently decent, with their rosebud Norwegian propriety, and this is interesting to me because it shows me how the mission to sing isn't always a result of pain.

I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At midday he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touched the hand of this inexplicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform.

[...] Sarah Ferguson remains lodged in the US talk show mind as a British 'royal' boil, or at least as someone who has had the honor of hearing the Queen belch after a rousing luncheon of peppered horse.

In Birmingham, Alabama, I rush myself to a dentist for the first time in 20 years. I insist upon codeine mixed with heroin and gin in order to settle my nerves, but this simple request is denied.

When my old friend Simon Topping appeared on the cover of the NME, I died a thousand deaths of sorrow and lay down in the woods to die.

I vomit profusely when I discover that the album [The Smiths] has been pressed in Japan with Sandie Shaw's version of Hand in Glove included. I am so disgusted by this that I beg people to kill me.

By now, Marr, Rourke and Joyce have magically transformed into the Beverley Sisters, each chanting how that awful Morrissey had destroyed their lives - and just when they were all doing so well with their musical careers.