I had never been to LA before. In fact I don’t think I had ever done a really big music interview before. Iggy Pop, in Las Vegas. Five days in the City of Angels to do a fifteen minute interview with the guardian angel of the spirit of punk. It is for opportunities such as these that young men forgo a steady income and anything resembling a home life to throw themselves into the world of journalism. Head-fucking-first.

LA, LA, LA… Iggy Pop! Shit man, I was sitting in Heathrow shitting bricks of gold.

Forty-eight hours later I’m alone in a hotel room thinking I’ve overdosed on coke. Knowing no one. As alone as the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation, stranded behind windows that don’t open in the fourteenth floor hotel room that someone else has paid for looking out over a city where I know no one. No. One. Alone in a hotel bathrobe. Sweating. Thinking, ‘I am not the first person to wear this bathrobe. I wonder if the last person sweated this much?’ Then thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon.

I had been out - to a music industry party up in the hills. It was awe inspiring, awesome and boring as hell. No one was drinking, everyone seemed to speak some different language to me and I instantly got the feel that LA was not a city, unlike New York say, that threw it’s arms open to the international hobo. And I thought all the music people I met were cunts. Might as well be honest.

It was easy to fall for the old ‘LA oh it’s so shallow’ thing. There must be more to it than that, I thought. But I was right, LA is not a city which gives up its delights easily. So standing up here on the fourteenth floor of the shera-hyat-hilton, looking out of windows that don’t open over a city that never greets, wearing a bathrobe and drinking a highball anyone, and I mean anyone, would look as miserable as Bill Murray. Anyone. Even a woman.

Two valium and fourteen hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, the bolt hole gothic hotel for anyone who wants to be bad in Hollywood and has more than the price of a motel room. The hotel where John Belushi died. Cool.

“Iggy’s running a liddle late,” said the record company PR, “it’s the third day of international press interviews, you know.” She managed to say this without making eye contact, making it quite clear that ‘international press’ - a catch all title that includes everything from dizzy Japanese TV presenters dressed like Hello Kitty, to serious Dutch music critics with enormous vocabularies and unsmiling faces. In LA ‘international press’ is about as glamorous as dog shit on a tiara. What they want is ‘domestic press’, and this I ain’t.

‘That’s OK,” I say sweetly. “How late.”

“About three hours,” she says. “And we may have to shorten your interview time slightly.”

After a heated exchange in which I made it clear I had not come six thousand miles to have less that fifteen minutes, I convinced her of the rightness of my case and she convinced me that yes, every single person in the LA music scene was a complete arsehole.

Every fifteen minutes one of the camera crews around me trails their international shit in to interview the great man, then trails out again as I move slowly to the head of the queue.

I heard the guy in front of me ask his questions. “So Mr Pop my name is Johan from ‘Der Guitar Electrical ‘, tell me do you find it’s like more rock and roll to use a six or twelve string guitar?’

Mr Pop doesn’t even play guitar.

By the time I get in the room it is gone seven in the evening and the Iggster has been at the international press since seven this morning. I do not hold out much hope of a good interview. I am also worried that Iggy, like everyone else so far, will turn out to be so far up his West Coast ass that I’ll be able to see his ring piece when he smiles.

So wrong. The man is tiny. And perfectly formed. And as wrinkled as an octogenarian elephant’s scrotum. He has the energy of several nuclear warheads and leaps off the couch when I walk in like a man set free.

“You’re from Loaded magazine, huh? So you just wanna hear about all the drugs, right?”

“Yes please.”

And he’s off…for twenty, thirty minutes he storms through a barrage of stories (the time he got ‘kidnapped’ by transvestites who shot him up with speedballs every hour on the hour for a week, in between doing unspeakable things to his ass; the time he destroyed a rich girls Ferrari with a chain saw) the man is a pump action quote machine and at the end he waves the dumb chick PR away for the fifth time and treats me to a ten minute Iggy Pop workout, including tips on how to take loads of drugs and still look as buff as he does together with long speeches on the importance of meditation and reading Greek myths.

His shit is unreal and I leave the room thinking that I’ve just met one of the most charismatic men in the world and suddenly thinking that LA and it’s music scene are not hell, they are it, the centre, the rock n roll eye in the centre of a shitstorm.

The next three days pass in a blur of bar hopping and shopping. I meet some people. End up back at a few people’s houses. I start to tell everyone how much I like LA. Most of the people are freaks, for sure, shallow as a puddle and twice as wet, but I am having a good time.

For the last night I have my name on the hottest ticket in LA this month. It’s Lemmy’s 50th birthday party at the Whiskey A Go-Go. Metallica are playing and so are Aerosmith and Motorhead and every porn actress and record company exec wants to go and I have had to wade through yards of LA music biz shit to even get myself one measly place on the guest list. But one place I have.

The queue when I get there is gargantuan and after an hour of slow shuffle I am still fifteen people from the rope, things are going very, very slowly and all around me the LA music scene types are talking inanities into my ear.

“Oh… my… God is that Debbie Hareeeee - she is, like, so, old!”

Shaddup bitch!

Then around me in the crowd a stirring becomes a craning of necks and a whispering becomes a murmur and I start to make out the phrase, “It’s Iggy! It’s Iggy!” and the ripple becomes a wave of excitement swirling ahead of him as, flanked by enormous minders, he walks the length of the industry queue. Tiny and perfect. Truly he is the King of Punk. And the people adored him.

Every so often someone calls out, “Hey Iggy!” or “You rule dude!” as he continues his march towards the velvet rope.

And then as he draws close to where I’m standing, two people back from the edge of the line and fifteen people back from the front he catches my eye in the midst of this sea of heads and says, real casual, but loud, like we’d arranged to meet there, or something: ‘Hi Marden!’

And the people saw that it was so and they saw that it was good and the crowd around me parts like the Red Sea.

“See you inside,“ he says.

Fuck. How cool was that. I FUCKING LOVE LA!

The bouncer catches the whole thing. Everybody catches the whole thing. I am a God, a lord at least of the LA punk scene, or at least this queue, a somebody from a nobody in two seconds. And the big bouncer catches my eye and starts the line moving quickly in, so he can get me in, the second Iggy sweeps past his rope. Within seconds I am one person from the front. The bouncer is nodding nicely at me, as befits ‘Marden’ the man who Iggy Pop wants to see when he gets inside Lemmy’s 50th birthday party. Fuck.

I’m at the front now and BOOM!

The doors of the club burst open as a trolley on wheels, a gurney if you will, a stretcher on wheels, a skateboard for the sick comes BOOM-in through the double doors propelled fast and hard by cops n bouncers.

And there, right in front of me is a girl, an attractive girl, lying right there on the gurney with her throat cut. Right open. Like a deep red smile. And time stops.

And time stays stopped for a bit.

And then suddenly someone presses ‘play’ again, the gurney starts to take off propelled by LA PD and bouncers and paramedics. The cops are shouting that no one else can come into the party - “These doors are closed, gentlemen!“ - and this big head that’s hooked over my shoulder so that it’s biker owner can see what’s going on, this big biker head just nods down at the girl with the slit throat as she’s wheeled away. He grunts. And he starts to stand up straight like he’s seen it all before. He just grunts and offers his summation of the scene he has just seen.

“Hnnnn…” he goes. “Nice tits.”