"THIS IS MY STORY, SCAR TISSUE AND ALL"

"Today my friend has misplaced her normal medical tourniquet, so she pulls off her pink fishnet stocking and uses it to tie off my right arm. She dabs at my exposed vein with an alcohol swab, then hits the vein with the needle. My blood comes oozing up into the spaghetti-shaped tube, and then she slowly pushes the contents of the syringe into my bloodstream"

Anthony Kiedis may not be an instantly recognisable name, but this man makes up one quarter of the biggest rock group in the world today - the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Born to rebel parents In Michigan, America; his childhood was a torrid conveyer belt of fighting, smoking and drug taking. When his parents split up Anthony was torn between the love for his Mother and the absolute adoration he heaped upon his Father, the young Anthony would dress like his dad, match his hairstyle to his and even spend a time as a child actor because his Dad decided he wanted to be a thespian. It wasn't until the summer of 1973 that Anthony pestered his Mum into letting him spend the summer with his Dad in California that a lifetime of narcotic abuse would begin, sitting one day at the kitchen table at his Dads house he was offered a joint and eagerly grabbed the chance to further emulate the man he admired. Marijuana turned into Percodan turned into acid turned into cocaine; soon Anthony had a not so healthy drug habit while still at school, taking anything him and his friend John could get hold of.

During this time there was one constant in Anthony's life - music. He used to jam with a ragtag collection of school friends when they formed a band. At first he simply introduced the group with funny poems and sketches but one day one of his rhymes was put to music and he started performing. Whether it was the artistry in these early efforts or the fact that he and the other band members used to dance manically no one can be sure, but the group soon got a reputation of offering something that little bit different in a funk rock style and the appearances and offers started coming in. Of course this gave Anthony the notoriety and more importantly the money to pursue his one man quest to use as many drugs as possible, and what followed was a journey into the depths of drug addiction and abuse. With a string of beautiful women in tow and numerous failed attempts to get clean it seemed that nothing could bring Anthony out of the hedonistic lifestyle, not even the deaths of several friends from drug abuse or the fact that he was not fulfilling his role with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

"The dealers are used to people buying twenty dollars` worth, or forty or maybe sixty, but you pull out a wad of hundreds and tell then you want five hundred dollars` worth. They can't even keep five hundred dollars` of crack in their mouths."

Scar Tissue is one of those books that will leave you emotionally tired after reading it. For those looking for an anthology of Red Hot Chili Peppers recordings this is not the book for you, indeed Anthony's addictive lifestyle take up more of the pages than his musical accomplishments. When music is written about it is not what one might expect being in such a huge band, recording sessions were always a matter of the other three band members jamming while Anthony sat in the corner trying to pen lyrics in his own inimitable way, and concerts were a drug induced blur during the earlier days. This is a book that I saw as much more of a warning than anything else; here we have a man with immense talent and money really struggling to find contentment in his life. While reading the book I started recognising patterns in the behaviour of Anthony, he would meet a girl and fall instantly in love with her, declare to one and all that this was the woman he was going to marry, and then descend into week long drug binges when the relationship broke down. I realised that for Anthony Kiedis everything had to be full on to satisfy his addictive personality - every woman was the one he would marry, every drug binge would be the last and every musical experience had to border on the spiritual.

Above all else though I came away from reading the book thinking what a thoroughly nice person Anthony Kiedis is, and that's not an easy conclusion to reach for a man who stole from an early age, was a self confessed bully at school and was a habitual abuser of narcotics. I got the feeling that with the right mentor he could have avoided such a self destructive lifestyle, but then again that would have altered the often pained lyrics he penned with perhaps the groups best known song "Under the Bridge" not being written. (The song is about the loneliness of heroin addiction). So this is a book for fans of the group that don't need to know the minutiae of every song produced, but rather the often tortured mind of the man behind them. It is also a fascinating insight into the fame and notoriety game in this celebrity obsessed world we live in today. The book is a hefty 465 pages in hardback with a nice smattering of pictures throughout, I found it a compelling read and devoured it in large doses, always wanting to know what lay ahead for Kiedis - but almost afraid to read what I often knew was coming. A mesmerizing story which I award four stars out of five.

"And when I think - "Man, a fu**ing motel room with a couple of thousand dollars` worth of narcotics would do me right," I just look over at my dog and remember that Buster's never seen me high."

Published by Time Warner