“People get the impression that I’m the world’s biggest rock and heavy metal fan but that isn’t it at all. My books aren’t primarily about the music, they’re about the stories. They’re not fan books, if I’m writing a book on, say, AC/DC I’m not thinking what the AC/DC fan will want to read, I’m wondering what to tell someone who has no idea about the band.

“The big bands do have the best stories. I started out as a writer when i was nineteen. I worked for Sounds and I wrote about all kinds of music but very soon I began gravitating towards the rock bands because they were more fun. I soon found that out travelling up to Bradford on a Sunday in a Transit van with the Lurkers, sitting on a guitar case for five hours then we slept on the floor of a pub after a show that about sixty people had watched. It made for a good story but it was all a bit miserable, then a few months later I was in the back of a limo with Thin Lizzy, off to the Hammersmith Odeon and at the party afterwards there was George Best, Page 3 girls, the place was full of drugs and cases of vintage champagne.

“Now, what shall I write about? Bradford with the Lurkers or George Best and cocaine? It’s a no-brainer and as the years went by it became my specialist subject. Kerrang! magazine started in 1981 but just before that I’d been PR for Virgin records, dealing with bands like Simple Minds, Human League and Japan. I’ve worked in a very broad spectrum of music.

“But when Kerrang! came along it was the first magazine to deal with that particular genre. Before that there were music magazines but it was a melting pot. Kerrang! was in colour, it was purely about metal and rock bands. The artists were huge all over the world, they had absolutely no pretentions of being relevant to politics and culture, they were just there to rock, to drive a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool and cycle down a hotel corridor. That seemed incredibly fertile territory to write about. And that’s what the show’s about – re-telling stories and particularly the ones that can’t be published. Lawyers for book companies are very, very conservative, they won’t take any risks whatsoever.

“Unfortunately after a couple of years we’d snorted away all the profits – that was my first encounter with cocaine – and I went very quickly from having a flat in West Hampstead with a garden so big that the local school used it for their fetes, with a driver, a secretary and the rest, then the firm was out of business, the building had burned down and I was washing dishes in a burger restaurant for £10 a night. Partly by choice, I didn’t want to work for bands anymore. You’re their PR bitch and it’s a thankless task except for the money so I spent some months washing dishes and getting off with waitresses.”

“My ambition was always having the best time possible, getting as out of it as possible, with zero responsibility, and that’s really hard work. In those days because of what I was writing, this was before the music industry as we knew it died, there was so much money in the business. Rock in the eighties was the biggest-selling music in the world yet you couldn’t hear it on radio. Tommy Vance for two hours a week on Radio One and that was it, yet these bands were out-selling everything that was on radio so the record companies had no option but to spend these lavish budgets on the music press.

“But – the Melody Maker and the NME hated rock music. They ridiculed it, they wouldn’t review it most of the time, then suddenly there was this thing called Kerrang! that wrote about nothing but their music. I’ve got so many gold records from band like Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Metallica, Bon Jovi, all because they got their launchpad by me writing about them. Then I got a TV show on Sky called Monsters of Rock and again I was the only one playing their videos. And so they’d send me around the world, sometimes for three weeks at a stretch, until finally I moved to LA in 1988.

“I had the proper lifestyle – the condo, it seemed the normal thing to go out every night and see Ozzy, Axl, Slash, that was was West Hollywood was like at the time. It was an incredible time; not only telling these stories but to be a part of them. I was living the life of Riley. If it ever looked dodgy though, I thought that I could always go back to washing dishes. I look back now and I wince at some of the opportunities that have slipped through my fingers because of either stupidity or simply not paying attention.

“I’m hardly in an exclusive club because Axl falls out with everyone. There’s no-one in the band apart from him, he kept firing the replacements and took thirteen years to finally release Chinese Democracy. This is not a guy who had a row with me and he put my name in a song. We never had a row – we parted on good terms, I showed him the interview and asked him if there was anything he wanted taking out – but you talk to Slash, any of the band, their management and anyone who ever worked for them and they all tell the same story.

There’s some crazy rock stars but Axl isn’t one of them. Axl has deep, serious frailties and issues. The whole not going on stage on time, not turning up for things, and inevitably people like me might think he’s an arrogant diva but he’s none of these things in truth. He’s really troubled and like a disability, you can’t poke fun about it and you can’t tell him off for being like that. It’s the way he was brought up and the way he is. He’s not playing the song live anymore, he’s put it behind him.