I used to ask them if they had ever taken shorthand notes at court, or doorstepped. Naturally, they hadn't."Such withering, and ultimately career-imploding, contempt for a profession he once graced (in an even earlier incarnation, he worked on local papers in Essex and London) earned him a reputation for being prickly and arrogant. But the self-destruct button was fatally pressed when, at the height of his fame in the late Seventies, he went AWOL on a sex-and-drugs binge in America. I suddenly find myself humming, out of his earshot, "You had it all, and threw it all away".But it is another great Cockney Rebel line that comes to mind as he agonises about "conflicting lifestyles" in the well-furnished sitting room of his beautiful Georgian home: "It's like a mild schizophrenia." Once on the road, admits the devoutly religious Mr Nice, 47, he soon reverts to the Mr Soft persona which bewitched boa-wearers and panicked moral guardians all those years ago.These days he is a born-again moralist who pours scorn on "the hypocrites who use the church for weddings and christenings but never attend for the rest of the year".
"You're supposed to be my mother and I have to look after you," one girl recalled thinking angrily, as she consoled her weeping mother. There are worse obligations too, ones which wrench against the grain of a child's natural instincts for solidarity or consolation. Children must sometimes choose between parents - a decision which is inseparable from some level of guilt. Even when they are only parting temporarily - for an access visit or a short holiday - they fret anxiously about the feelings of the parent left behind, conscious that their own continued affections might throw salt into emotional wounds. "I'm not particularly interested in the grotesque or in disgust," he says, reflectively. Idiosyncratic fetishism is much more his line.'Flesh Guitar' is published this week by Victor Gollancz, pounds 9.99..
Divorce is usually represented as a crashing disruption of family ties but, as Children of Divorce (BBC2) has been demonstrating, it also involves strange inversions too - leaving some relationships intact but upended. I know lots of women who are very keen on music but never in the way men are. For example, women never know who the 'base blayer' is in Iron Butterfly."Rock music was once very important to Nicholson. And her number one fan is Bob Arnold, a greasy-haired nerd in horn-rims who has chronicled every gig, every movement she has ever made.
