Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2001]
Keith Altham: No More Mr Nice Guy!
Robin Askew
At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic
rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast
is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang
a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes
clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually,
Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in
the bathroom in place of a print of the Salvador Dalí
painting titled The Great Masturbator. “After all,”
she reasons, “it will just be replacing one wanker
with another.”
For 25 years, Keith Altham was a “friend of the
stars”, as they say, first as a journalist on the NME and
then as PR man for many of the biggest names in rock,
from Rod Stewart to Van Morrison and Paul Weller to
Ray Davies. He regressed from representing to Rolling
Stones in the 60s to “Orville the bloody duck” in
the 90s, at which point he wisely decided to jack it all
in. Rather than writing an autobiography, he’s chosen
to spill the beans on his pop star chums in the rather
cheesy format of individual letters addressed to each of
his former clients. (To Van Morrison: “What can I say?
What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What
BUY Keith Altham books online from and
a pain in the arse!”)
In many ways, this is a bloody awful book: poorly
written, littered with typos and spelling errors and reeking
of self-aggrandisement. But Altham really was at
the centre of it all during the 60s and 70s. It was he who
suggested to Jimi Hendrix the idea of setting a guitar
on fire. And in one of the great forgotten footnotes of
rock history, he once took Jim Morrison to see Status
Quo (“Tell them to turn down, give up and go home,”
sneered the Lizard King).
If you’re prepared to endure the leaden prose, there’s
a huge reservoir of great stories here. Altham particularly
admires Sting, despite Mr Sumner’s propensity
“to be such a humourless prat”, and seems to have preferred
the company of down-to-earth heavy metallers
like Saxon and Uriah Heep, although he loathed their
music. Fortunately, he doesn’t allow these personal
friendships to prevent him telling yarns that show them
in a considerably less than flattering light. Many of
these sail very close to the wind indeed. M’learned
friends may wish to examine his introduction for what
would appear to be a libellous statement about that
018
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