Allan Jones - Too Late To Stop Now. Book Review.

Allan Jones

Too Late To Stop Now

(Bloomsbury)

By Paul Davies

            This unputdownable book should come with an excess all areas warning. It's rammed with finely recounted anecdotes from an era when musicians spent as much effort having a wild time offstage as they mostly did onstage. To report their high jinks, there was a cadre of journalists chopping along also experts in how to take advantage of record company largesse. This involved a few who could easily match if not exceed the excesses of the artists whose rider they were indulging in with wild abandon. Re-enter former Melody Maker and Uncut magazine editor, Allan Jones, who has published his follow up memoirs to the Sunday Times 2017 music book of the year, I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, and he's raised the ante on Too Late To Stop Now. Subtitled More Rock N Roll War Stories. It’s Jones’ shot proof like liver and nose for a good time that emerges victoriously intact from this second magnificent instalment of his storied life reporting from rock music’s frontline.

            The page turning tales commence with a last minute one on one champagne fuelled print deadline rendezvous with a gaudily dressed Elton John in his Dorchester Hotel suite. It’s 1974 and Jones is three weeks into his first role at Melody Maker and this booze fuelled interview is a primer for the entertaining on the road shenanigans to come. When not in the pub sharing the good times with his fellow scribes, Jones is in the thick of it being set on fire by The Damned; immersed in an inebriated vodka encounter with Peter Cook, strange and surreal interviews with Peter Gabriel, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and a bizarre meeting with Yes’ Jon Anderson on the French Riviera. All of which is emblematically documented with Jones’ inventive quips and highly engaging prose. As one of the very few journalists to get on with Lou Reed, it’s also clear that the artists and bands mostly got along with Jones and his insatiable quest for danger.

            The heady blend of interviews, between 1974 - 2014, with rock stars, prog minstrels, punk reprobates, new wave songwriters and much more… and their rise, and decline of some, into household names is a priceless collection of tales from an time when music writers reported without restrictions from the warts and all battleground of music. Taking its title from a Van Morrison song, the wheels quite nearly came off Jones' many hilarious journey's as he crashed around with the subjects involved here. Thankfully, and miraculously, he survived to tell these outrageous first hand stories. This is a first-class Rolls Royce Phantom of a book.