During 30 years as a music writer for Smash Hits, NME, The Face and Q, Sylvia Patterson witnessed all the excesses of the crazy world of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

Here, The Sun shares some extracts from her book, I’m Not With The Band, the best of her encounters with music’s biggest characters.

Prince ‘never wasted  erections’ but found self-promotion sexy

8

HAVING been summoned to Paisley Park to speak to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince in 1996 to discuss the singer’s Emancipation album, Sylvia was upset to discover that he found clever marketing much sexier than women.

No recordings of Prince’s speaking voice were ever permitted because a reporter once tried to sell his voice and, besides, he believed anything important would somehow be “remembered”.
I ask: “You’re the man who once said, ‘I never waste an erection’.”

Prince: “Oh, boy. (enormous smile) Oh, man! That’s right, I said, ‘I hate to see an erection go to waste’. Heheheh! Well, I feel I’ve just as much sexual energy as I ever had, I just find other things sexy these days.”

I ask: “What do you do with an ill-timed erection these days?” Prince: “The energy goes on other things. Look at this.”

Crushingly, he reached over and fondled a box of Emancipation-logo embossed calendar cards counting down to release day, a cute marketing device for stores. “That I find sexy,” he averred.

New Order’s Barney wanted to kill me for exposing his sexploits

8

THE first words singer and guitarist Bernard “Barney” Sumner said to Sylvia on meeting her in LA in 1986 were: “Ask us anything horrible and we’ll break your ****ing legs”.

Around 3am, your genuinely startled pop reporter was stirred awake by the sound of a rock star having sex with two groupies.

The next morning, with Barney gone, I heard the girls giggling, knocked on their door, was invited in by two gothy late teenagers and interviewed the pair for a lark.

When the Smash Hits article appeared it featured some blaring innuendo concerning our foxy young friends.

“Ten minutes later”, nudge-nudged the article, “some very un-male-like giggling can be heard resounding through the walls – is Barney having some very restless dreams?” Within weeks, New Order were interviewed in thunderingly righteous indie weekly Melody Maker and Barney had his say.

If he ever saw me again he would “kill” me. His wife was threatening to divorce him. And three years later, she did.

I did not know Barney Sumner was married and nor did I know that the couple, in 1986, had a two-year-old son. 

Tim sat and ate his lunch,  then asked four times if we’d eaten

8

A LUNCH with The Charlatans singer Tim Burgess back in 1995 turned into a very boozy afternoon – where the singer struggled to keep up with Scottish writer Sylvia.

Preceded by beer and followed by vodka, lunch became a four-bottles-of-wine bonanza, during which Tim consumed half a bowl of his broccoli pasta then asked four times whether we’d eaten yet or not.

In a Soho pub he fell all the way down a very steep staircase, where he sat momentarily dazed, a barman peering down at him and then ambling over to me.

“Ma’am?” he announced. “Your friend. He has fallen down the stairs.”

That day in Soho, the “pretty bendy” Tim Burgess was unscathed, soon giving me his fake $35 Rolex watch featuring deep sea diving countdown dials, bawling Champagne Supernova while splayed on top of a stranger’s car bonnet and, when asked, couldn’t remember where he lived.

Bobby thought he was on a par with Jesus . . . but Elvis was still above him

8

DRUGGED-UP Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie was so off his face during a 1992 interview with Sylvia for Details magazine that he ran out of the room.

That day, Bobby Gillespie, a man anointed by the UK music press as “the last great rock ’n’ roll star”, had taken so many drugs on their insanely narco-powered Screamadelica tour that he ran out of his hotel room believing the carpet was on fire (merely a ­Quality Street wrapper glinting in the daylight). Before his sudden room-bolt, Gillespie had talked about the lack of real rock ’n’ roll stars.

“Where’s the exoticness? Where’s the extra-terrestrials?” he despaired, in the glam-pop wilderness of ’92. “There are no pop stars any more, except us,” he evangelised poetically.

“We’re heavier than Guns N’ Roses. Elvis is above me, Madonna’s below. I’m alongside Jesus but swimming with Prince.”

Ludicrously excessive Bros party  put Henry VIII’s famous banquets to shame

8

TWINS Matt and Luke Goss were the hottest thing in British pop as Bros back in 1988/89 – but they couldn’t boil a kettle.

Once, in some spartan backstage conference room, I watched Matt eye a kettle in a kitchen area, wander into the living area and ask his PR if she would make him a cup of tea.

It wasn’t that the task was beneath him, he just did not know how to make a cup of tea.

The rest of the band called him Pampers. “’Cos he has to be looked after all the time,” confessed Luke.

With industry cash still abundant, Bros’ label CBS/Epic splashed an ocean’s worth on a ludicrously lavish party in London over five floors. The main room was dominated by a 15ft ice sculpture of the word BROS and their Lego-men logo, while tables creaked under the strain of food and drink, the party’s theme being an unambiguously ambitious The World.

On one floor was splayed a demented spread of countless tables of pasta, sushi, curry, cheeses, fish ’n’ chips, hot dogs (and everything else), while a sweeping Hollywood staircase took you up towards tables of beer, wine, Russian vodka, sake, whisky (and everything else) in an extravagance of consumption on a Henry VIII scale with a view to permanent gout. By the time I left, I could not walk.

Amy’s days were consumed by obsessing over calorie intake

8

IN January 2007, as Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album reached No1 in Britain, Sylvia spent two days with the troubled singer in New York.

Back then, her most alarming behaviour was her obsession with the calorie.

Her days were filled with the constant policing of her minimal food intake, giving a running commentary on the amount of fat, sugar, salt and carbohydrate of every meal she contemplated.

“It’s too late to eat!” she wailed in a restaurant one night at 10pm. “Maybe I’ll have some mussels. I could just eat the sauce.” Another time, presented with a carton of French onion soup, she peered under the lid, declared, “It’s all full of cheese and s***”, and fished out the offending strings of fat. A bowl of clear, noodly soup on another day, meanwhile, was met with “Happy belly!”

She made me fondle her steely stomach muscles.

“And that’s not even good, for me,” she chirped, bowling along, all Twiglet legs, toppling beehive and Fonzie leather jacket, insisting all the effort and vigilance was merely for “health reasons, not weight”.

Damon was known as the era’s monumental pain in the a***

8

BOTH Blur bassist Alex James and Sylvia realised the band’s singer Damon Albarn was a brat.

We loved gregarious bassist Alex James, who was always going on about infinity, we loved sensitive guitar-smith Graham Coxon with his indie-poet soul and we loved drummer Dave Rowntree, an agreeable character even before he took all that Ecstasy.

Lead singer/songwriter Damon Albarn, meanwhile, was widely acknowledged as not only Blur’s but the actual era’s monumental pain in the a***.

In late April 1997, after The Britpop Wars, Damon stepped off a plane in Rome with Blur.

Alex, peering through huge, round, thick-framed, yellow-tinted “Miami glasses”, scanned the blue sky and announced to the assembled: “Another sunny day in pop.” Damon reached in silence to the evidently offending sunnies, plucked them off Alex’s face, gleefully crumpled them up in both hands and replaced them on his nose, now unwearable, buckled and lens-less. Alex merely laughed.

Later I mused to Alex that this wasn’t a nice thing to do. “I know,” he smiled. “Well, you know, he’s a bloody . . . c***.”

Shaun started the day with a bottle of Guinness and ganja

8

FORMER Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder was so upset by Sylvia’s 1995 NME article about new group Black Grape, his security guard pushed her up against a wall.

“You’ve got massive t*ts, man”. So announced Shaun Ryder, the first words he piped on our Caribbean introduction.

The 33-year-old was a changed man, had been on Prozac for a year and was completely off the smack and crack, even if his first bottle of Guinness was cracked open, with his teeth, at 7am, followed by a sizeable daily dent in the Jamaican ganja reserve.

Shaun switched the recorder off. He said: “D’you really think I’m gonna start talking about ‘growing up in an atmosphere of fear’?”

The following year, at the NME Brat Awards, Black Grape won Single of the Year for Reverend Black Grape. In a shadowy Academy corridor, a shape loomed over me and a finger wiggled into my face, attached to the frothing form of Shaun Ryder. “You fookin’ betrayed me!” he barked. “You said you wouldn’t print it!”

He jabbed on as the realisation dawned he’d objected to the phrase, in print, “an atmosphere of fear”.

Extracted from I’m Not With the Band, published by Sphere on June 16, £18.99