Saturday 1 June 2013

Simon Mason,
Author of Too High, Too Far, Too Soon, will be reading from the book at Stoke Newington Literary Festival, Saturday 8th, Sunday 9th in the Budvar Tent.
This book is a memoir, already described as ‘Britpop meets breaking bad’ although quite where that came from I’m currently unsure.
Alan McGee, founder of Creation records once described me as
“The Rock n Roll doctor”
Which was very kind of him as for much of the story it is clear I was more in need of a doctor than I was capable of actually behaving like one, albeit one of a somewhat different variety to your local GP!
Escaping from a “tatty seaside town” to the metropolis in the mid eighties, the journey moves from wide eyed (too much speed) teenager to the ever present narcotic appendage powdering the wheels of a music business seemingly enthralled by any band with a half-decent haircut and a an appetite for staying up all night talking nonsense. As the lines get longer and the guest lists bigger, it becomes glaring obvious to everyone other than our protagonist that all is not well.
Finding yourself standing in front of 10,000 utterly obliterated Scottish indie kids as they scream for the band you’re currently ‘working ‘for to come on stage as the two pills and half gram of coke you’ve just ingested vie for space in your bloodstream, may sound like the kind of experience a I could only have dreamt about when I was younger. When you have a wrap of heroin tucked inside your pocket that on some level is telling the other drugs in your system to fuck off because they are redundant now, somehow takes some of the sunshiiiiiine from the moment.
Live Forever?
Only as long as we don’t run out of smack eh? In which case it’s die forever, or certainly feel like you want to die until we score some more eh Simon?
Oh and did I mention that as well as having something of a drug problem, I was also labouring under the illusion that rather than being the provider of staying awake material to rock stars, I was in fact only passing the time until the roles became reversed and people would be giving me their drugs in order to circle my orbit and serve up the attendant satellites to MY universe, yeah I’m a rock n roll star!
Not surprisingly the Britpop party comes to an end, at Knebworth, when as many people have previously said, we should have ALL called it a day, maybe started being kinder to ourselves rather than slide away to anywhere that availed the chance to stick needles in myself, generally upset everybody I came into contact with while becoming an unwashed, undernourished junkie scumbag.
Much of this story takes place in Stoke Newington, so I’m actually feeling very privileged to be appearing at this year’s Lit fest, almost 7 years to the day since I last injected a speedball whilst cowering in the car park, the very same car park I will be reading extracts from the book from, rather than trying to find a vein that hasn’t collapsed .




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