Although it is never mentioned by name, the US drug rehabilitation centre where these memoirs are set is the one I stayed in during the mid-1980s. I sweated and withdrew in the same detox unit, threw up in the same pristine toilets, and ripped branches off trees in the same pine woods. Like Frey, I was appalled by the bumper-sticker platitudes, and heavily resisted the corny, God-lite approach of the [...]

For those of us who grew up - or failed to - in the 1970s, the previous decade aroused powerful and often conflicting emotions. Although we were born in the 1960s, we were not of the "Sixties". We were glad to be riding into a glorious new future on the paisley shirt-tails of the brave pioneers who had been clever and gifted enough to be born a few years before [...]

The influential music journalist Paolo Hewitt spent the early years of his life in "care", although, as is so often the case, "care" turned out to mean its exact opposite. Born to a mother held in a psychiatric hospital, Hewitt was, as the law insisted, taken from her on the second day of his life. So began his painful journey of being moved randomly and repeatedly from foster home to [...]

Except as an alternative means of transport, cycling does not receive a very good press in England, if indeed it gets any attention at all. Cyclists are seen as a perverse minority who enact strange and brutal rituals for grim, unknowable satisfactions. Bicycling just isn't glamorous. It's what you do before you learn to drive, or can afford a car. Cyclists shave their legs, can't offer lifts to girls and [...]

My experiences of seeking help for my own "mental health problems" as a teenager bear out one of the themes that run through Roy Porter's useful and readable mini-history of madness - that "sanity" and "insanity" are very subjective issues indeed. Depending on where and when you are living, as well as the training, mood and ability of the professional or institution at whose mercy you throw yourself, you are [...]

"Yeah, I know he was a shirtlifter an' all, but he was a diamond geezer, who loved his mum and a pint of cockles and wouldn't have hurt a fly, unless someone called him a poof, which he was. The streets of the East End were safer with proper gents like him and his brother around. God bless him." This popular view - still served up in pubs from Bethnal [...]

Most of the doctors I know are keen to dismiss the notion that they ever went into medicine with the idea of serving humanity, of making a difference. What attracted them, they claim, was the power, the money, the nurses, the selfish euphoria of being able to save lives, rather than saving lives for the sake of it. But I don't really believe them. I prefer to imagine that they [...]

Nowadays, opium is a fairly rare drug in England, perhaps because the profit margins from importing heroin are so much higher. I know this because, in the early 1980s, after I had outstayed my welcome in south-east Asia and returned with a powerful physical dependence on the drug, I sought help from my doctor. After prescribing me a controlled drug (as was my wish), he informed the Home Office (as [...]

Ten years ago, when the original edition of Behind the Shades was published, there were signs that His Bobness was about to rise again from the dead: his collaborative efforts with the Traveling Wilburys had given him a fresh sound and a new audience; his live shows had a dynamism that had been lacking in the previous decade, and, to cap it all, Oh Mercy received the critical and commercial [...]

Like the author of this book, I love mowing the lawn. I have been trying to persuade my mother to turf the front garden of her new house so that, when I next visit, I'll have a larger area of grass to destroy with her new rotary mower - which, although an unfashionable model, is at least powerful and capable of starting on the first pull of the cord. My [...]