‘It’s not the jump that hurts,’ Eddie Van Halen told me,‘it’s the landing’
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6
I was very sad to hear that Eddie Van Halen ( right), the world’s greatest rock guitarist, has died aged 65 after a lengthy battle with various cancers.
He was a wonderfully flamboyant showman, best known for Van Halen’s foot-stomping anthem Jump – in which Eddie would perform gigantic leaps on stage – and his mesmeric solo on Michael Jackson’s Beat It. But offstage he was a sweet, funny guy. I once asked the former hard-drinking, drug-guzzling hellraiser how he’d survived in an industry littered with so many tragic, though often self-inflicted, deaths.
‘I’m very lucky,’ he chuckled. ‘Good genes! But no, actually, just music. Making music keeps you young.’ ‘Can you still do that jump?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘But it hurts a little more when I land. It’s not the jump, it’s the landing.’
If ever there’s a perfect metaphor for life, it’s that. But the fear of a painful landing should never stop us jumping. RIP Eddie.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13
Mike Tyson appeared on Good Morning Britain today, and I was excited to catch up with the boxing legend. We’ve been friends for 20 years and he always delivers very frank, opinionated and news-making interviews.
Given that he’s due to make his controversial comeback fight next month after 15 years out of the ring, I expected fireworks. Instead, we got something rather more akin to a damp-squib Catherine wheel that fails to ignite.
Tyson, looking vacant and confused, replied to each question from Susanna Reid and me with slow, mumbling, incoherent answers, and his head kept slipping down towards his lap as if he was nodding off.
It was an incredibly awkward few minutes of live television and Twitter blew up with all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain his condition, many linked to the fact that he now owns a large cannabis farm and recently boasted of smoking ‘$ 40,000 of weed a month’.
But this seemed an unlikely reason given how ferociously he’s been training and the fact that any positive drugs test would wreck his upcoming, very lucrative televised fight with Roy Jones Jr. Also, our producer, who was in LA with Tyson, said he’d been on jovial, chatty form when he arrived for the interview several hours earlier.
Tyson later offered a less exciting but more plausible excuse for his weirdly soporific performance: ‘Hey mate,’ he tweeted me, ‘I tried to stay up late for interview but fell asleep and like a lion I’m hard to wake once asleep. Training hard and going to bed early. I had no monitor so I couldn’t see you guys and forgot to look into camera.’
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16
‘In taking revenge,’ said the great philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, ‘a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.’ I experienced both sides of this wise observation this week, from two figures associated with my beloved football team.
The first was ex-Arsenal star Nicklas Bendtner, who has written a riotously entertaining book about his life on and off the pitch.
The Danish player’s stupendous ego – he once boasted he would become ‘one of the world’s greatest strikers… better than Zlatan [Ibrahimovic]’ – was never quite matched by his ability, and fans like me gave him an increasingly hard time before he finally left in 2014.
Despite this, we enjoyed a very cordial interview on GMB today, right to the very end when I thanked him and he suddenly sneered: ‘You know, Piers, if you were a millionth as good as you think you are as an interviewer, you’d be a great interviewer.’
Susanna was shocked and bemused at what seemed like a totally gratuitous and unprovoked taunt, but I knew better and laughed out loud.
Many years ago, I tweeted about Bendtner: ‘If he’d just been one millionth as good as he t hought he was, he’d have been a great striker.’ He hadn’t forgotten. By contrast, tonight I appeared on Ireland’s The Late Late Show, and a fellow guest (neither of us was in the studio due to Covid restrictions) was former Arsenal manager
Arsène Wenger, whom I spent years campaigning to unseat from his job after his once-mercurial powers waned.
His new autobiography doesn’t mention me by name, nor that of his other bête noire, Jose Mourinho, who branded Wenger a ‘specialist in failure’.
So when the show’s producers asked me to provide a question for host Ryan Tubridy to ask Wenger, I decided to have some fun.
‘I have a question here from Piers Morgan,’ said Ryan, ‘whom you’ve had a fractious relationship with… he says, “Arsène, if you were standing in a hot- air balloon with Piers Morgan and Jose Mourinho, and it started to lose air, who would you push out first?” ’
Wenger smirked for several seconds and then replied: ‘ I would try to sort it out myself.’
I admired this classy reply as much as I admired Bendtner’s ruthless zinger.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18
The very first celebrity I ever interviewed was Cliff Richard, at The Wimbledon Theatre when I was an unknown, 19-year-old trainee journalist on the local paper, and he was a 54-year-old pop superstar.
He gave me two hours of his valuable time and couldn’t have been more charming, respectful or helpful.
Today, in his 80th birthday week, he appeared on my Life Stories show (it airs tonight on ITV at 9pm and is very moving and entertaining) and was just the same Cliff I first met 36 years ago. He’s just aged a hell of a lot better than me!
‘Why do you look 55 and me 80?’ I complained when we met backstage. ‘You look OK, Piers,’ he chuckled. ‘Well, not as bad as your Spitting Image puppet anyway.’