Grace Jones: I'll Never Write My Memoirs, by Grace Jones and Paul Morley: Book review

How Grace Jones rode the rock 'n' roll rollercoaster

The title's not hypocrisy, but chutzpah: Jones has not written up her remarkable life's story, but instead tasked the rock writer Paul Morley with that challenge.

Between them they tell an extraordinary life. When Jones was expecting her son, Paulo, Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry threw her a baby shower at Studio 54. The first time she tried ecstasy it was under the tutelage of Dr Timothy Leary. When she arrived in Paris to model in the 1970s, she, Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall were the first signings of a brand new agency. Hers would be a notable career, even if she had been born a WASP on Fifth Avenue. That she was raised in 1950s Jamaica, in a pious, Pentecostal home (her father and brother are both bishops in the church) makes it nothing short of astounding.

Jones's early years could have been the breaking of her, but seem instead to have been the making of a fearless, questing spirit. Her parents sought their fortune in America, leaving their six young children to the care of Jones's maternal grandmother and her much younger minister husband, Mas P, who ruled over his inherited brood with a rod of iron. Grace refused to be cowed. Years later when she was cast as the violent henchwoman, May Day, in the James Bond film A View From A Kill, she channelled Mas P's pitiless gaze.

At 13, her parents took their children to Syracuse, New York. By her late teens, Jones had embraced the 1960s counter-culture of America, moving to Philadelphia, then New York and immersing herself in a music and drug-fuelled world. In the early 1970s, after being advised that she would only make it as a model in America if Europe embraced her striking looks first, she flew to Paris, tripping on acid all the way.

Jones certainly does not come across as easy here – and you wonder how tough a task her generously credited co-writer had in marshalling her stream of consciousness. She devotes a whole chapter to her lateness, cheerily admits that she has at times behaved appallingly and includes her terrifying rider as an addendum.

Her scenester's analysis of Studio 54, disco and the toll Aids took on that world are fascinatingly insightful and moving. Her evocative descriptions of Jamaica and how she grew to love it again are transporting. And if Jones can at times be no-holds-barred she can also be admirably generous to those, like Chris Blackwell, who helped her reach higher. You would never want to get on the wrong side of her, but she's mostly a blast to hang out with here.

Simon & Schuster £20. Order for £16 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030