I have previously mentioned a new book by veteran British music PR Alan Edwards   ( I was there) which sheds light on his life with some of the biggest names in music, including David Bowie, the Spice Girls and Amy Winehouse.

I invariably find that books not exclusively about David can be amongst the most informative. I was impressed by how David stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the best artists he had worked with .I also had no idea how knowledgeable David was about the Press in general and his skill in getting what he wanted. Curiously Coco gets a free pass. Not a bad word said. I highly recommend it.

This time around it was the turn of Suzi Ronson and her book “Me and Mr Jones”. Although I review professionally I bought the book with my own money!

I approached Suzi’ Ronson’s “Me and Mr Jones” with some trepidation. There were obvious elephant traps galore but overall I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly, it is sharp and well written, I suspect a testament to the editing team at Faber. The reality is that she only knew David for a brief period of time, firstly as part of his broader social set with Angie, and then intimately on tour with him for Ziggy.

I was not that interested in, or bothered about her unremarkable, atypical home life or nascent career as a hairdresser. I did enjoy her tales of the louche, bohemian, dissolute lifestyle at Hadon Hall. Her admission that she had slept with David felt designed to give her story credibility, and she was at pains to point out that it was ok with Angie.  So she “had” the lead guitarist and singer with the band…, she has to work hard to steer this away from being a groupie’s  tale. And yet her good fortune is told humbly. One good haircut creates Ziggy for David and the band, and soon she is their stylist and hold of the backstage to onstage torch from which she swears to keep confidences untold. And yet there is a pretty unedifying  explicit tale of David rapaciously devouring a young man whom she had been instructed to lure out of the crowd in the back seat of his limo n she presents his time with rhe LA “Baby squad” as a matter of record.

Curiously, underpinning all of this is Tony Defries’ managerial brilliance, and any idea that David was living a life of penury patently untrue.

Obviously she has the inside track on the firing of the Spiders via an overheard conversation.

Once Mick is fired, there is no more “Me and Mr Jones” but several interesting lines of exploration are squandered. The Hunter/ Ronson nexus  is defined by how much she liked Ian and his wife, the premature abandonment of the project blamed on the management deal that Mick had signed with Defries. The musical background is pretty much ignored- perhaps she didn’t know?

She is stronger on the background  to Mick and Dylan’s  Rolling Thunder tour, however her gripe that she was not invited on the first part of the tour seems churlish. The musical and ephemeral anecdotes are strong, engaging ,and well told and worth the purchase in their own right including a great story about the two tour bus caravan  and Bobs’ Winnebago in  which he inadvertently left his dog tied to a tree a hundred miles back and had to send a biker to recover the dog.

Shockingly she reveals that Mick ended up owing Mainman money for the Rolling thunder tour he spent so much on drink, drugs gambling and assorted expenses. Is this DeFries at his worst? Or were Mick and Suzi, both grown ups, hopeless at managing their financial affairs?

Overall a good read, well written. The book ends abruptly with a cursory mention of Mick’s passing which disappointed me, Bowie fans are Ronson fans. No mention of Lisa Ronson  ( recently of Holy Holy Fame) either and she is such a talent. Loved hearing her sing “Lady Stardust”, and friends I believe with Morgan Visconti. Mick’s farewell on the big stage at the Freddie Mercury tribute when he played , majestically , with Bowie and Hunter on “Dudes” is not mentioned. It appears that post the Spiders schism, she hasn’t heard from David at all. But the book is billed to be about her and David- so it meets its objectives.