Jumpin’ Jack Flash by Kieron Pim review – David Litvinoff and his squalid world of rock stars, junkies and wide boys

An intimate of the Rolling Stones, jester to Eric Clapton, close to the Krays, painted by Lucian Freud … Litvinoff’s exuberant life of sex, drugs and violence makes for an engrossing but upsetting biography

This surely has the most startling beginning of any biography to be published this year. David Litvinoff opens the front door of his flat and gets knocked out by a punch in the face. Coming back to consciousness, he finds himself bleeding and naked, with a broken nose and shaven head, tied to a wooden chair, which is strapped to the outer railings of his balcony high above Kensington High Street. As he moans, and twists in the chair like a grotesque Francis Bacon male nude, he hears a mystifying chant coming closer. Wrestling with the binding ropes, squinting through dripping blood, he sees thousands of duffel-coated idealists, holding Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament banners aloft, hollering “Ban the Bomb” slogans, tramp beneath the balcony on an Aldermaston march. None of them notice the squirming prisoner suspended vertiginously above them.

Related: The real-life Jumpin' Jack Flash: how David Litvinoff shook the 60s

Continue reading...