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Tuesday 8 April 2008

You can't fingerprint for it

Being a rock star is a major responsibility. Beyond the unreasonable fan expectations and the pressures of recording, touring and contractually-obligated creativity; a major burden at the back of any rock mind must surely be the fact that you're meant to die an exciting and unusual death, often at the age of 27.

Chief among these is, of course, choking on your own vomit. It's a good way to go, rock-wise. Vomit is a wonderful fluid, redolent with the haunting aromas of lost loves and decayed friendships; a tangible reminder of a night out which has otherwise passed into the miasmic fug of history. It also has lumps in it.

What a lot of people do not consider in these cases, though, is that vomit does not just come from over-indulgence in drugs alone. There is no vomit bladder, or any other organ to produce the sickins. For there to be vomit, there has to be something to vomit up, in medical terms. I am an investigative soul and my search for truth has already made me fairly notorious in several village libraries. Not least in Rustington, West Sussex, where I accused a dear old elderly librarian of covering up vital details in the Robert Kennedy assassination. She cried then and she is still crying now. Bitch.

But I digress. What I really wanted to get into the public domain were the full details surrounding the untimely demises of Jimi Hendrix and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. Many people have wondered exactly what it was they had been eating to cause such a drastic failure of their own bodies' emetic sex-fun systems. I am happy to report that, through careful bin rummaging and my nose - which, had I decided to, could have made me a highly sought-after employee of the perfume industry - I can now exclusively reveal the answers.

JIMI HENDRIX
27.11.1942 - 18.9.1970

The famous American banjoist Hendrix was found dead in his London flat in September 1970. Quincy, the medical examiner on call at the time, decreed that the cause of death was asphyxiation on his own tummy fudge. I tracked down the key evidence in this case in a bin outside Hendrix's old London pad in Brook Street. Tipped off by the blue plaque on the wall, which intimated that there was indeed a Tesco bag full of puke belonging to the great man nearby, I was able to track down the delicious sick. Identifying it at Hendrix's was fairly easy, as it contained 3 afro hairs from his flamboyant rock and roll coiffure, and a gold-embossed plectrum with JIM written on it in biro.

Using a scientific apparatus called the Gas Chromataspuke, I was able to run tests on the sample and create an accurate timeline of ingestion for Hendrix's last few hours. Here are my findings.

19:00 hrs - Hendrix necks a two litre bottle of Tizer.
19:20 - Palate refreshed by the Tizer, Hendrix eats 2 bags of Big D dry-roasted peanuts and a plate of bangers and mash
19:33 - more Tizer
19:42 - Hendrix's girlfriend arrives with a bag of Dolly Mixtures. Hendrix has a pink one and one of those yellow cube ones.
19:56 - Tizer
20:17 - Hendrix and his entourage decamp to a pub in Camden. Over the next two hours Hendrix drinks 4 pints of Watney's Red and eats a bag of ready salted crisps.
22:46 - Hendrix stops off at a late-night shop to buy a packet of sweet cigarettes and eats two. On the way back to his flat he finds a roadkill badger and eats it raw.
23:30 - Hendrix reports to friends that the badger "is not sitting right" and extinguishes the flames with some Britvic.
23:34 - Hendrix throws up the badger

The rest, sadly, is history.

JOHN BONHAM
31.5.1948 - 25.9.1980

Bonham, Led Zeppelin's exceptional lead cellist, was found dead in a room at a hotel near Windsor. The on-call coroner, Quincy, attributed cause of death to choking on tasty, tasty sick. The maid at the hotel had kept the spew in a ziplock bag for the past 28 years, just waiting and hoping someone would one day come along and properly research this case. For a small donation and a number of other acts, she parted with her bounty and I was able to get to work. The Gas Chromataspuke by this time being clogged with badger hair, I was forced to resort to more Victorian measures. So, I fried the sick up in an omelette and ate it. Whilst this method does not provide a timeline of events like the more modern machinery, it still allowed me to know exactly what Bonham had in his digestive tract on the fateful night.
  • 2 packets Pom Bear
  • 2 cans Gold Label barley wine
  • Box of Matchmakers (mint)
  • 3 Quality Street
  • Roast beef
  • 2 pints gravy
  • Bag of Skips
  • Pickled onions
  • A Pork Farms buffet pork pie, with piccalilli.

1 comment:

bleep said...

Important work there 'mund.

I intend to die of a heroin overdose in the bath, but I just can't get to grips with smack. It makes me so sleepy.

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