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Coronet has waltzed off with I Don’t Take Requests by DJ Fat Tony in a “significant” pre-empt.
Publisher Hannah Black bought world rights from Ruth Cairns at Featherstone Cairn. The book will publish in hardback, audio and e-book in May 2022.
The publisher said: “DJ Fat Tony has been described as ‘the closest thing that club culture has to a national treasure’ and the ‘unlikely cult hero of quarantine’. Few people have crammed so many lives into one. When your first line of cocaine is aged 16 with Freddie Mercury, where do you go from there…
“I Don’t Take Requests is Fat Tony’s breathtakingly candid and outrageous memoir of a life of extremes, written with journalist Michael Hennegan. From his childhood on an estate in Battersea where he honed his petty criminality, was abused by an older man and made friends with Boy George, to his teenage years spent parading the Kings Road in his latest (stolen) clobber, working as a receptionist for a prostitute, hanging out with Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley and creating his drag persona, to his life as DJ to the stars and his spiral into serious drug addiction. It is all here in horrifying, glorious, heart-breaking detail.”
Fat Tony said: “If you'd told me 15 years ago that I would be sitting down to write my life story I’d have laughed in your face. If you'd have told me that I’d still be alive, I probably wouldn’t have believed that either. It's been such a long journey for me – telling my story and giving hope to anyone who needs it is so important and telling that story signed to Coronet is like a dream come true. When you start to believe, you're half way there.”
Black added: “As one of club culture’s most notorious – and best loved – figures, Tony is a complete force of nature. He tells the most extraordinary stories of depravity and hedonism, of week-long benders and extreme self-destruction. But also writes movingly of recovery, redemption, friendship and the joy of a good tune – and he is very very funny. We are so proud to be publishing his story."