ABOUT THE AUTHOR continued

 

The author with rap star MC Hammer 1991

From 1982-84 I had a weekly Pop and Rock Column in the Daily Mirror as well as writing regular music and showbusiness features. In 1984 I left to become a freelance writer. Since then my features have appeared in publications as varied as : The Sunday Times, Esquire, the Observer, Daily Mail, Sunday Mirror Magazine, the Mail on Sunday, You Magazine, Night & Day, the Saturday Times Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, The Independent Magazine, GQ Active, GQ, Sunday Express Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Own, Today, the Face, Condé Nast Traveller.

During the last ten years I have interviewed dozens of major celebrities including: Shania Twain, Tom Jones, Melissa Etheridge, Tina Turner, Garth Brooks, U2, Frank Sinatra, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Brooke Shields, The Three Tenors, David Bowie, Uma Thurman, Keanu Reeves, Lucy "Xena" Lawless, Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, Helen Mirren, Ulrika Jonsson, Jessica Lange, Michael Douglas and Ralph Fiennes, Janet Jackson, Woody Allen, and novelist Iain Banks. Sports personalities include: Olympians Colin Jackson, Denise Lewis and Ato Boldon, cricketers Sachin Tendulkar, Graham Thorpe and Phil Tufnell, soccer stars David Beckham, Roy Keane, Paul Ince, the inimitable Gazza and the LA Lakers wonderboy Kobe Bryant.

  
Smoking a waterpipe with Brooke Shields in Cairo in 1999

In the course of my work I have visited over 50 countries on five continents. That has included stints travelling across the untracked wastes of Siberia and snowmobiling across Alaska, three months in China just prior to the massacre in Tian An Men Square and such surreal moments as listening to fado singers in a bombed out hotel in Mozambique or drinking too much beer with a lecherous government minister in Pemba. As a journalist my greatest failure was one of timing. In 1991 I left Moscow to interview a ballet company twenty minutes before the tanks rolled into Red Square.

Shania Twain: the Biography is not just an account of the how, what and where of a remarkable career. It is also explores the why and in doing so touches on many other things - Native American history, bootlegging in the thirties, Indian gurus, the history of country music and the fascinating history of Mutt Lange.