Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre: A Biography of The Doors By Mick Wall
Published by Orion
£20/eBook £10.99
**** (out of five)
"This is the end…”
So begins Mick Wall’s biography of The Doors.
And what an ending it was.
Picture Jim Morrison, alone (not in a bathtub as is often reported) but hanging off a toilet, trousers around his knees, fat, brain fried to pieces, dangling dead from an overdose of heroin.
It’s Paris, it’s 1971, and far from painting a nostalgic picture of a creative genius using drink and drugs to cope with the pressures of fame, Wall goes right to the core, or the gore, of the story first.
Wall isn’t the kind of buttoned-up, mind your Ps and Qs writer to use soapy expressions like ‘passed away’ or was found ‘in a compromising position’; the first paragraph describes Morrison with his pants around his ankles… and he starts as he means to go on.
An English author and journalist who has been working inside the music industry for over 35 years, Mick Wall started his own PR company, Heavy Publicity, in the ’70s.
There he worked, or as he puts it “drank and took drugs and ran around like a wildling with groups such as Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Dire Straits, Journey, The Damned and others” before starting as a freelance writer, working for Kerrang!, being sacked from Virgin for “wayward behaviour” and founding Classic Rock Magazine.
He has written biographies on everyone from Led Zeppelin to John Peel and AC/DC and is now working on developing a biopic of Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott with the film director Mike Jeffries.
There is an Irish link to Morrison (born James Douglas Morrison), who had both Scottish and Irish ancestors and came from old fashioned, straight-laced Presbyterian stock.
Wall has an amazingly sordid story to work with here.
The Doors sold over 100million albums but their story ended as badly as the swinging sixties did.
Punch-ups, sex, jail time, depression, abortions, STDs, heroin, groupies and junkies — this is a no-holds-barred account of the Strange Days of The Doors.
It’s an unflinching account, with some ‘can that really be true’ moments (like when Morrison shoves Janis Joplin’s face into his crotch at a party in LA and she responded by smashing a bottle of Southern Comfort over his head).
Wall coolly leaves star worship aside here and instead delivers a brilliantly gossipy read.
