Iggy Pop and the laxatives

"At the time, working for NME was all enormously impressive - as a 17-year-old virgin from the provinces I had a good excuse to be impressed by this rubbish. If Robert Plant bought journalists half a shandy they thought it was fantastic. But no one had any money. The bands were living on a fiver a week and we weren't paid anything. It was hard enough trying to find the money to buy a bottle of cider. In the early Seventies, with dinosaur rock, everybody was living like hogs, but by the late Seventies Tony Parsons and I were taking lemonade bottles back to the shop to get the money for the fare to work the next day. It was an incredibly cheap lifestyle when you look back on it. If a PR had half a gramme of coke in the office it was like the second coming. What they wouldn't have done for a lick of dandruff. I have got one good story: Iggy Pop tried to get off with me in Manchester. We were in his hotel room. He was always bothering me and was obsessed with me. Tony (Parsons - Burchill's ex-husband and fellow NME scribe) promised him some speed pills but it was laxatives and he had to go on stage. He was not well-placed to do a live show."