Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld review – mover, shaker, myth-maker…

Keiron Pim’s account of swinging London’s notorious fabulist, a man who befriended rock stars and gangsters, is absorbing and revealing

Who was David Litvinoff? To certain aficionados of London in the 1960s, his is a fabulously enigmatic name who connects discrete worlds that collided to create the seismic social upheavals of that decade. He knew the Krays and the Stones, Lucian Freud and Peter Rachman, Eric Clapton and George Melly, and a whole gallery of aristocrats, rock stars, artists and criminals.

He contributed to the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express, was doorman at a Soho clip joint, and was “dialogue adviser” and “technical consultant” on Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic Performance, in which Mick Jagger and James Fox trade psychic places as rock god and gangster. But more than anything he was a raconteur, a brilliant storyteller and fabulist who played court jester to the Chelsea set of the 1960s.

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