When I started working for a music magazine in 1969 memorable meals didn't feature much in our lives. The whole point about fitting into Biba clothes and staying out late in clubs precluded food; it just wasn't cool and interfered with the dark plum lipstick we wore. I spent a lot of time at Apple, the Beatles' headquarters in Savile Row where the favoured few were encouraged to hang out by the legendary press officer, Derek Taylor. In his huge, light office on the first floor with the Beatles, James Taylor, Marmalade and Apple's other artists wandering in and out we drank and smoked. At Christmas there was always a big party and one year John and Yoko dressed as Father and Mother Christmas: I think there may have been some mince pies on that occasion, there might even have been a turkey - it was before Paul and Linda went veggie.
Good home cooking really didn't feature much as it was considered extremely uncool. I recall some stunning pumpkin fritters at Hallowe'en cooked by Cream's Jack Bruce's wife at his house in Primrose Hill: I'd never eaten them before. And of course there was the macrobiotic brigade. Those meals stick out for their memorable horribleness: sticky brown rice, lentils, watery vegetables. Marc Bolan was a macro fan and we'd stagger through bowls of brown mulch sitting on the floor of his flat in Notting Hill. Being stoned sure helped get it down. Steve Howe of Yes was a serious yin and yang food follower, but his cooking - in an Aga before they were really trendy - at his house in Hampstead Garden Suburb was much more palatable.
The Who - despite their guitar-smashing reputation - were comparative homebodies from the early days because they were all married. Pete Townshend lived on the river in Chiswick, brewed tea and made home-made wine in the downstairs loo; Roger Daltrey lived in the country and was amazingly good at doing up houses himself and cooking. Keith Moon, the drummer, was a law unto himself. One afternoon in the early Seventies I arrived to interview him at his house in the country. Various cars he'd wrecked littered the long drive and when I eventually found him he was riding a donkey over whose head he'd rigged up some wing mirrors. We sat by the pool, into which he'd earlier driven the lawn mower, and watched the poolside fridge endlessly disgorge ice cubes - he'd broken that too. Moon rarely ate, getting his nourishment from booze.
Bands staying in good hotels were usually a reliable source of food to impoverished hacks. It was much better to eat at the hotel and bung it on room service than suffer backstage food which was so rank that within the next decade bands wised up and put riders in their contracts specifying what they wanted. I remember an eventful meal at the Portobello hotel with Alice Cooper where we had to feed a live mouse to his stage-prop python. We then settled down to eat, confident that the snake would nod off, instead of which it disappeared into the hotel plumbing for several days. Alice looked scarey but was actually a dream; Joe Walsh of the Eagles had a terrifying reputation but was a really lovely guy. Led Zeppelin could reduce grown-ups to trembling wrecks but I remember laughing like drains with them, especially Robert Plant.
With the decline of the hippie era we began to pay more attention to food, particularly in America where it just seemed more exotic, particularly in California. In those halcyon days record companies would fly journalists over to see bands at the drop of a hat and pick up the bills for pretty much everything. Favourite hotels were the Sunset Marquee, Chateau Marmont and the Hyatt House (known as the Riot House for obvious reasons). It was while checking the band out of this hotel that Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant was, as usual, settling the huge bill for trashing the rooms, when the weary manager turned to him and asked 'Mr Grant, why do they do it?' Without missing a beat Peter peeled off another wad of notes, handed it over and said 'Have one on me'.
At around this period of insanity that I wrote a song with Captain Beefheart in the basement garage of the hotel during an earthquake. I'd got to know him fairly well from his London trips and we'd just persuaded him to sign with Virgin as Richard Branson was desperate to get him, so he went straight out and spent the advance on a Stingray Corvette. 'Very dangerous car,' he'd rumble, appreciatively. 'All the fuel tanks run under the seats.' It was in the vicinity of this new toy that we composed a song called 'Night of the Garter' before driving off to the valley to listen to his new sax player, Del Simmonds. The Captain was not a picky eater, and the mainstay of his diet was brandy Alexanders, but that night we stopped and ate doughnuts at his favourite Donut Diner under a horrible flourescent glare, while he held forth about extra-terrestrials and doodled me some drawings which I've still got. It was rather an Edward Hopper moment.
He had a love/hate relationship with his old friend Frank Zappa, who I always went to see when in LA because he made me laugh so much. Food at his house up in the canyon? Nah. Just coffee and cigarettes as I recall.
My really smart eating phase started with doing a stint as in-house PR to Elton John. It was just after Yellow Brick Road, so he was famous, but not as stratospherically so as he is now. He was touring almost continually which meant some good meals in the private tour jet (we hid Stevie Wonder in the loo on one journey as a surprise for Elton), and because Rocket Records was such a close-knit family there would, in the early days before his drug addiction completely took over, lots of birthday parties. Probably the most productive was a lunch for all the staff at Montpeliano in Knightsbridge where he suddenly decided to hire a 747 to fly the whole office to LA which we duly did. A whole 747 filled with friends is a great way to travel - I did it again a few years later when Richard Branson launched Virgin airlines, and the pilot came on the intercom half way across the Atlantic to ask passengers if they could spread out evenly across the plane rather than stand with their champagne on the left hand aisle as we were causing the plane to tilt.
Strangely, throughout Elton's really drugged-up phase he still threw parties, but would not actually join in but skulk. He did just this at his fortieth, where a brand new red Ferrari sat in the middle of the drive, wrapped in ribbon with a huge bow. The rest of us had fun though, but not as much as we did at his fiftieth fancy dress party at Hammersmith Palais. He was clean by this point, but nevertheless had a hissy fit in the truck taking him there when it got stuck in the traffic jam caused by everybody arriving. The food was off-the-scale delicious - pan-Asian - and it took me most of supper to recognise my neighbour Brian May under the pink Edna Everage wig. Boy George did the disco and my hangover lasted two days.
Separate box for Freddie recipe?
But backtrack to 1975 when Elton's manager, John Reid (whose legendary and incendiary temper left Elton's tantrums in the shade), took on Queen. We toured the country in a coach promoting Night at the Opera, and all that Freddie seemed to eat at the time was biscuits - lots of them. It was during his skin-tight white jumpsuit phase, so he really couldn't eat much before going onstage. But as their fame and fortune increased, so did their lifestyle and by the time he died Freddie had house staff, one of whom has written a memoir incorporating some of Freddie's favourite recipes.
