Hellraisers

Lounge Bar Legends

Richard Burton
Started smoking at eight – when he died he had a five-pack a day habit - and was a regular boozer by twelve. Burton was notorious for his unrestrained pursuit of women while filming. Joan Collins wrote that when she rejected his on-set advances, he embarked on a series of liaisons with other women including an elderly black maid who, according to Collins, was "almost toothless". Collins playfully told Burton that she believed he would sleep with a snake if he had the chance, to which Burton is alleged to have replied "only if it was wearing a skirt, darling". During the 60s Burton drank two bottles of vodka a day and his two-time wife Elizabeth Taylor did her best to keep up.

Richard Harris
Harris once quipped that he had joined Alcoholics Unanimous: if you didn’t fancy a drink you rang a fellow member and he would convince you to get on the sauce. Harris's lifelong love of booze was instilled in him from an early age. One of his favourite teenage tales involved driving a massive haulage truck to Dublin at 17, on an errand for his dad. Despite his orders to be back home promptly, he headed for the nearest pub after making the delivery. A few drinks later, Harris set off and soon up ahead was a bridge warning "Clearance, 12 feet". Thinking he could just make it, he sped on, but ran straight into the superstructure, lifting it clean off its pillars. Flagged down by a policeman, Harris opened his window and shouted: "Sorry, officer. You see, I'm just delivering this bridge to Limerick." Later in his career he took to cocaine with a passion. "Oh I use that white stuff, up me nose. I smoke some weed, that kind of thing," said Harris. "But I never take drugs."

Peter O’Toole
The last of a generation of legendary hell-raisers, O’Toole once cavorted with the best of them, but, perhaps tellingly, stopped drinking years ago. O’Toole started his boozing very early in his career: The all-male cast of his first play at the Royal Court in 1959 made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. Once went driking with under-study Michael Caine and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole. 'What fucking day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.

Keith Richards
Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts once worried that it was the band that had pushed Richards into drugs. Not so. “I've asked Keith about drugs,” Watts reported. “He's said he likes them.” Richards has always done exactly what he wanted to, and has fought his corner from the get-go. On June 26, 1973, Luigi, his caretaker, opened the door of Richards' London home to a party of ten policemen. By then Keith could have had few illusions about what the dawn visit meant. Between them, the officers carried off armfuls of grass, heroin, methadone, Mandrax tablets, water pipes and brass scales, as well as a .38 Smith & Wesson, a shotgun and several boxes of bullets. He’s just given up the booze, he says. We’ll see: when he quit heroin for a time in the 70s he still did ounces of coke because it "wasn’t really a drug".

Charles Bukowski
In his early teens Bukowski had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by his friend William "Baldy" Mullinax, son of an alcoholic surgeon. “This is going to help me for a very long time,” he later wrote. And indeed it did. Failing to break into the literary world, Bukowski grew disillusioned with the publication process and quit writing for almost a decade, a time that he has referred to as a "ten-year-drunk". These ‘lost years’ formed the basis for his later autobiographical chronicles. His gravestone reads simply ‘Don’t Try’. Once asked, "How do you write?" Bukowski replied, “You don't. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. You wait for it to come to you.”

Brendan Behan
There was a time, not long ago, when the pubs of Soho and Fitzrovia in central London were filled with characters. Writers and painters and actors, hard-drinkers with stories to tell and fights to fight. Brendan Behan – poet, novelist and raconteur – was one of these chaps. Behan described himself as a "drinker with a writing problem". And he did drink. In the early years the pubs north of Oxford Street, and indeed the bars of New York, rang with Behan’s wit and outrageous behaviour. Towards the end he became the caricature of the drunken Irishman. The public who once extended their arms now closed ranks against him; publicans flung him from their premises. Collapsing at the New York’s Harbour Lights bar in 1964, he was transferred to the Meath Hospital in central Dublin, where he died, aged 41.

Keith Moon
Off-stage excess, hotel room destruction, drug and drink abuse and legendary bad behaviour: for over ten years Keith Moon defined what it was to lead the rock and roll lifestyle to the hilt. Saskatoon, Canada: during the midst of one of the Who's frequent North American tours, Moon finds himself bored. He wanders into town where he discovers a hardware store that carries exactly what he is looking for. He gleefully returns to his room with a new hatchet. A while later when a roadie comes to get Keith for that evening's performance he finds the drummer sitting atop a huge pile of dismantled hotel furniture. "Just trying to keep meself out of trouble, mate." Moon rarely kept himself out of trouble, and the world was brighter for it.

Steve Dunleavy
You may not have heard of Steve Dunleavy, but no matter. Dunleavy epitomised the hard-drinking, sensation-seeking tabloid journalist. He may, in fact, have invented the style. But Dunleavy, unlike the preening, self-serving modern day Gordon Smarts, got real stories. He delivered. He is the man who got exclusives with Elvis’s bodyguards; got fresh stories from the girls at Chappaquiddick and mafia boss John Gotti; got drunk on Mojitos with Fidel Castro. There was the night a blizzard buried Manhattan and Dunleavy, 'reclining' with a young woman in a snowdrift outside Elaine's, and had his foot run over by a snowplow. Snarled Pete Hamill of the Daily News, "I hope it was his writing foot." Famously slept off his drinking in a straight-backed chair in the New York Post’s city room.

Lemmy
Ian Fraser Kilmister: singer, bass guitarist and mutton-chopped caner with rock legends Motorhead. During Lemmy's time with Hawkwind, he developed an appetite for amphetamine and LSD and was to become renowned for his use of amphetamine. Before joining Hawkwind, he recalled Dik Mik, a former Hawkwind sound technician, visiting his squat in the middle of the night and taking speed with him. They became interested in how long "you could make the human body jump about without stopping", which they did for a few months, until Mik ran out of money and wanted to return to Hawkwind, taking Lemmy with him. “I first got into speed because it was a utilitarian drug and kept you awake when you needed to be awake, when otherwise you'd just be flat out on your back. If you drive to Glasgow for nine hours in the back of a sweaty truck you don't really feel like going onstage feeling all bright and breezy.”