In Search of the Pleasure Palace
Disreputable Travels

By Marc Almond
Macmillan
December 2004
ISBN: 0283073136
248 Pages, Illustrated, 5 ¼" x 8 ½"
$29.95 Paper Original

---

What happens to people who were once "pop" stars? Are they destined for a life of daytime television appearances, reunion tours and well-meaning strangers struggling to recognize them? Despite an impending 45th birthday, a milestone age that can often result in some sort of mid-life crisis, Marc Almond, singer and songwriter, is not quite ready to take his place on the "they were once famous" line-up.

This is Marc Almond's quest for meaning in life now that he is in the Indian Summer of his career. In this rollercoaster journey, Marc goes in pursuit of the thrills, spills and bellyaches that made each day of his youth memorable and created an image of him that was decadent, outrageous and worryingly misunderstood. Almond's vivid and often wittily acerbic pen candidly records insights about his thoughts, the nature of being who he is, his often bizarre lifestyle and the places he visits as he attempts to navigate a course through mid-life.

From swinger's nights in Croydon to the lost haunts of Barcelona, from Russia's surreal underbelly to the pre-Giuliani clean-up of New York, Marc is the observant guide to a world he was once a part of and few have access to - through fantastic, wry anecdote. Marc Almond, once the epitome of counter-culture is now in search of our present-day equivalent and in doing so finds a life after pop, after youth - a life which he is still very much a part.


Return to the Trans-Atlantic Home Page