Somehow the tour manager managed to find me a Balthazar of champagne. I think a Nebuchadnezzar is bigger – you need a couple of footmen for the Nebuchadnezzar – but the Balthazar is big, the biggest bottle that one person can carry. There’s enough for a party in there.

It was quite late when I got back to the hotel with my big bottle, but there were quite a few fans there. I invited the five prettiest ones to come up to my rooms. You need five girlfriends when your bottle of champagne is that big. I collapsed on the bed and they jumped on me and covered me in champagne and kisses. It was a good birthday party. I stopped having sex occasionally, but only so that I could have more drugs.

That image of myself soused in champagne being devoured by lusting women in a luxury hotel suite in a vast and unknown city was the pinnacle of my rock and roll excesses. I thought, as a rock star, I owed it to people to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. Turpitude, extreme immorality, is the privilege of the rock star. No one else would get away with it.

Even film stars and footballers have to conduct themselves with some degree of common decency. Absolutely every proper rock star in history has gone through a phase of self-indulgence of proportions inconceivable to the rest of the population.

I was with Colin Pillinger [head of the Beagle 2 Mars mission] at the Groucho and we’d drunk too much absinthe. I was running to the toilet to be sick, but I didn’t make it and I lost my lunch on the floor. I felt much better and insisted on clearing it up myself. I was still mopping when Courtney Love arrived. She liked my shirt and she lifted my mop and gave me her phone number. I wondered what booze to take to her house. I settled on a magnum of rosé champagne.

She was wearing a dressing gown when I arrived. We drank the champagne quickly, from the bottle, mainly. She’s had so many songs written about her, probably more than any other living person, and now I know why. She’s a very beguiling woman. I really liked her, we were having a great time, but I had to go to New York.

Damien [Hirst] had another show, and, being banned from the Mercer, had taken the top floor of the SoHo Grand for his stay. It had a large roof terrace.

Things were really spiralling out of control. As the sun came up Keith [Allen], Damien and I burnt the backs of our wrists with hot lumps of charcoal from the barbecue on the roof. The circular scar was the sign of the Embers, a select brotherhood about which I can say no more as it is highly secret.

The burn gave me gyp the whole weekend. By the time the show opened, I’d been up for three days and I had pus dripping down my left hand. The gallery was rammed with New York high society at a high frenzy. There was a girl called Fanny. She’d written a novel. We left right away. We went back to my room at the Mercer and danced to the Bee Gees. So many of the great episodes of my life have been interspersed with the music of the Gibb brothers.

We went out for breakfast and I put her on a train to Brooklyn. I had a bad case of the horrors and went back to my room to die. To my surprise Keith was sitting on the bed tucking into a room service breakfast. He was wearing a pink suit. I wanted to know how he’d got into the room and he said he’d told reception that he was my boyfriend. He had some vodka with him and that took the edge off everything. We walked round to the SoHo Grand in the sunshine, comparing burns.

The roof terrace was a battle scene. The best suite at New York’s second-best hotel was littered with the unconscious, the unsavoury and the undressed. I felt much better, drank some vodka and took all my clothes off.

That was when Damien threw the watermelon. It was the size of a beach ball. He picked it up and hurled it backwards over his head with both hands. It sailed clean over the parapet. The street 50 storeys below was a busy one. No one took a direct hit, but only by chance, and a fair number of people were completely slimed.

The police arrived quickly. There were a lot of them. They arrested everybody, especially the naked ones. I said I had to go inside to get my clothes. The door of the suite was open and I darted through it, unnoticed, scrambling into my trousers and leaping into the lift half-dressed when it arrived. I only just escaped from New York that time.

There is a natural elegance in youthful excess, which gradually turns uglier as one gets older. Uglier and uglier and uglier. Did I want to be chasing women when I was 65, or, worse still, drunk, legless and lonely like Jeffrey Bernard? No. The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.

I’d spent about a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. It sounds ridiculous but, looking back, I don’t regret it. It was definitely the right thing to do. It was completely decadent, but I was a rock star, after all, a proper one, with a public duty to perform.

© Alex James 2007

Extracted from Bit of a Blur by Alex James, published by Little, Brown at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £15.29 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy