There are so many famous people scattered through your story.
Are you nervous about any of them reading this book?
A bit. There's not many nasty stories.
I put the record straight. Tina Turner and I had a falling out at the VH1 divas thing.
She went and did the Oprah show and kind of bad mouthed me and said I was a spoiled child.
In fact I wanted to put the record straight on what really happened.
I think at the end of the day, we were both culpable of- you know.
I shouldn't have done what I did, but she drove me to it.
So it was her fault.
Billy Joel, who I love, and toured with three times, fell asleep at the piano.
At Madison Square Garden, during Piano Man.
I learned more about Rod Stewart in this book than I-
Oh, Rod Stewart and I were always so much fun together.
We were rivals in the sense that we were both happening at the same time. He a little bit before me.
And we've always had a great sense of humour with each other.
We've always played practical jokes on each other and we've always had such a laugh.
I've had more laughs with Rod than anybody else probably.
I'm not showing with you dressed like that, I can assure you.
Why not? With that on? You're not going with that hat on?
Why not, look at you? It looks like Dusty Springfield in a nightmare.
But it goes quite far, the Earls Court blimp.
Well he had a blimp because he was playing Earls Court for about five nights, which I wasn't happy about,
the fact that he was playing for five nights.
And I was staying at The Inn on the Park, which is now the Four Seasons in London.
And I could see it, hanging in the sky.
So I rang up John Reed and said 'Rod's got a blimp by Earls Court, can we get it down?'
and I didn't have to say anything else and he mysteriously got it, I think shot down.
Different times. The next time I looked, the next day it wasn't there.
So I rang Rod up and said 'Oh dear, can you see your balloon? Your blimp from where you are?'
'Oh yes, dear I can. Isn't it fabulous.' And he looked out the window and said 'You bastard.'
And then the next year I played Olympia and I had a big banner right across the road,
where Olympia is. And I swear to god it was up for about thirty seconds and he'd already had it down.
It went up at 2'o'clock in the morning, it was down by 2'o'clock and 30 seconds.
Wonderful memories.
He and I have laughed so much over the years. He has a great sense of humour.
We've both got the same sense of humour.
Now, some people obviously aren't still around.
I didn't realise you were very close with John Lennon. Yes. I met him when he was just
finishing his crazy phase and going into his laughing phase. He'd just done a rock and
roll album, which was a very hard album for him to do with Phil Spector. I think he had
a lot of issues at that point. He was with May Pang at the time, he'd broken off with
Yoko and we more or less hung out together for a year and a half, two years. He sang
on my records, I played on his. We did a lot of drugs together. But we had so many laughs,
him and Rod Stewart are the two people I'd probably laugh with the most.
And Freddie Mercury.
There's a very New York story about you and him, holed up in a hotel room. Oh,
yes. It was like we were doing cocaine and it was like 1:30 in the morning and there
was a ring on the doorbell and I thought 'oh, who's this.' So it took me about ten minutes
to creep over to the eye hole and look through the door. It was at the Sherry Netherland
hotel and I went to him 'Andy Warhol' and John said.. And so we didn't answer the door
and so I said 'Why didn't you want to let Andy in?' and he said 'He's always got a bloody
camera with him.' Nothing private with Andy. So I thought god, he wouldn't let Andy Warhol
in but that's because we were high as a kite.