Michael Peppiatt’s legendary friendship with Francis Bacon began in Soho in 1963 and lasted until Bacon’s death almost thirty years later.
Fascinated by the artist’s brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt followed him on his nightly rounds of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club, sharing Bacon’s ‘gilded gutter life’ in London, Paris and Tangier, and meeting everybody around him from Sonia Orwell and Lucian Freud to Andy Warhol and the Kray twins.
In this intimate, deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has since enveloped him. This is a living, speaking likeness of the greatest artist of our times.
