‘I’ll make you a deal,’ said a hoarse Steve Harley. ‘I won’t forget you, if you don’t forget me.’ He was on stage bellowing above a chanting crowd at Hammersmith Odeon on a Monday night in April 1975.

(Pulling those numbers together and writing down that year makes me realise how ancient we are, those of us who remember it, and how alien it is to those born years afterwards who take little from it. If they return to that era, as trends in music and fashion tend to, it’s to the following year, when the outlook of a rebellious rising generation changed. Anyone could be in a band, and anyone could look as though they were.) The previous month, during which Harley celebrated his 24th birthday, the single from his then current album, propelled him into the stratosphere by reaching the Number One slot in the UK for a fortnight. Harley and his band Cockney Rebel were at a hotel in Los Angeles. They jumped into the pool, fully clothed, on hearing the n…

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Someone once wrote that they were not born a redhead but born to be a redhead. Some of us were fortunate enough to be both.

We remained that way until mother nature and our father's genes (or so I believed) colluded to force our hairline to retreat in early adulthood and disappear completely by the time we left our twenties. There is something semi-Masonic about being a redhead. The actress Julianne Moore has mentioned how we tend to notice each other and 'notice our identity'. It's a club, a tribe, a minority. A ginger group, of sorts. Baldness never bothered me, but I was crushed by no longer being a redhead. Ginger. Of course there are greater losses, but these came later, and others will come later still. Long after the loss of youth, hair, looks and loved ones comes the loss of faculties, mobility and independence. And when it comes to pain and illness there is an argument that redheads feel it more than your average mousey blonde, strawberry blonde,…

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Words spoken almost half a century ago by a man who meant very little to me at the time, and of whom I had little knowledge and little interest, came to mind when John Lydon failed to become the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - staged this month in Le Royaume-Uni - as front man of PIL, with the song 'Hawaii'.

These words were spoken in the high season of punk during which I collected my weekly copy of Sounds on the way to school, and perused it en route to the bus stop for the short ride to Camberwell, via the ramp of the brutalist estate completed three years earlier. Work begun in the high season of glam rock ('In every dream home a heartache'), with the final flagstone laid the summer the Philadelphia sound was wafting through walkways and stairwells, as it emanated from the Philips cassette pet belonging to one of our gang. The cogs on a C30 or C60 or C90 tape rolled and MFSB rallied. By 1977 they were raging: 'Let's clean up the ghet…

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A wealthy, middle-aged bachelor once told me, apropos of nothing, he was saving homosexuality for his dotage. 'I'm saving The Beatles for mine,' I quipped.

It was a steamy season in London and the two of us were seated in the rotunda at BBC TV centre, smoking cigarettes and staring skyward towards the golden sculpture of Helios. It was halfway through the 1990s, two decades beyond the moment in which the BBC and The Beatles came together to make history. In the seismic year of 1966 satellite technology made it possible for television stations across the world - with the exception of the USSR, naturally - to transmit as one. The world's first global broadcast occurred the following year: each country participating offered up something local and cultural. For Germany it was Lohengrin from the opera house that Wagner built in Bayreuth. There was a concerto from the Met in New York, and Franco Zeffire…

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I was sick. Poorly. Queer. Under the weather and out of sorts. I was ill. I prefer this to the previous words and expressions. It conjures up damp English afternoons.

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Three years before David Bowie’s death in New York in 2016, the curators of London’s V&A exhibition David Bowie Is published a list of his favourite books.

Among the inevitable philosophers, artists and beats there were a few surprises (Stephen King, for one), but none more so than The American Way of Death by the US-based English writer Jessica Mitford, published in 1963. The book, a bestseller at the time, was an exposé of the American funeral business revealing how the “dismal trade” of undertaking turned death into a booming industry.

Mitford died in 1996, while updating the text: she had opted for a cheap funeral with no ceremony. Bowie went further by bowing out with a direct cremation within hours of his demise. It was a worthy antidote to the vigils that followed, as middle-aged fans with Aladdin Sane make-up prostrated themselves before a badly drawn Bowie mural in Brixton. Last year Karl Lagerfeld settled on the same option despite …

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I’m not the first person to stand outside Suite 434 at the Beverly Hilton out of morbid curiosity, and I won’t be the last.

Those who have taken the lift to this floor and passed the framed images of Marilyn Monroe, the Rat Pack, and a couple of Kennedys have doubtless been many since an infamous February night in 2012. A figure dwarfed by those who have made similar, shall we say, pilgrimages to hotel rooms in this city where drugs have brought the wild and the famous to their end. How many, for instance, have stood outside the room where Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose at the Landmark Motor Hotel in 1970 (wisely changing its name to the Highlands Garden Hotel in the years that followed)? Or the room at the Chateau Marmont where John Belushi suffered a similar fate in 1982?

Calling this a pilgrimage on my part is stretching it. I’m in Los Angeles to interview an architect. The magazine has parked me in this hotel for four days and three nights. It occurred to me that this was the hotel where Whitney Houston was found dead six years ago. It was gala night the day before the Grammys which, like the Golden Globes, is held annually in the mammoth International Ballroom on the ground floor.

Standing here outside the door to the suite — the number has since changed — tucked away in the corner of a corridor in muted shades of beige and brown which, like the carpet and the aforementioned gilt-framed photographs, belong in a less salubrious hotel, a story emerges. It is the story of another night, and another awards ceremony held in this City of Angels years before a body was found in the bathroom of Suite 434 at the Beverly Hilton.

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