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Jumpin Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock 'n' Roll Underworld
'REVELATORY.' - DAILY TELEGRAPH *****
‘Pim’s remarkable book pulls from the shadows the story of a man who did his best to leave no trace.’
Will Hodgkinson, a The Times Book of the Year
David Litvinoff (1928–75) was ‘one of the great mythic characters of ‘60s London’ – outrageous, possessed of a lightning wit and intellect, dangerous to know, always lurking in the shadows as the spotlight shone on his famous friends. Flitting between the worlds of music, art and crime, he exerted a hidden influence that helped create the Kray twins’ legend and Lucian Freud’s reputation as a man never to be crossed; connected the Rolling Stones with London’s dark side; redirected Eric Clapton’s musical career; and shaped the plot of the classic film Performance by revealing his knowledge of the city’s underworld, a decision that put his life in danger.
Litvinoff’s determination to live without trace means that his life has always eluded biographers, until now. This extraordinary feat of research entailed 100 interviews over five years, with everyone from Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull to James Fox and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser: the result is by turns wickedly funny, appalling, revelatory and moving, and epic in its scope as it traces a rogue’s progress at the interface of bohemia and criminality from the early Fifties to the Seventies. It is also an account of Keiron Pim’s determined pursuit of Litvinoff’s ghost, which took him from London to Wales and Australia in a quest to reveal one of British pop culture’s last great untold stories.
‘Pim’s remarkable book pulls from the shadows the story of a man who did his best to leave no trace.’
Will Hodgkinson, a The Times Book of the Year
David Litvinoff (1928–75) was ‘one of the great mythic characters of ‘60s London’ – outrageous, possessed of a lightning wit and intellect, dangerous to know, always lurking in the shadows as the spotlight shone on his famous friends. Flitting between the worlds of music, art and crime, he exerted a hidden influence that helped create the Kray twins’ legend and Lucian Freud’s reputation as a man never to be crossed; connected the Rolling Stones with London’s dark side; redirected Eric Clapton’s musical career; and shaped the plot of the classic film Performance by revealing his knowledge of the city’s underworld, a decision that put his life in danger.
Litvinoff’s determination to live without trace means that his life has always eluded biographers, until now. This extraordinary feat of research entailed 100 interviews over five years, with everyone from Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull to James Fox and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser: the result is by turns wickedly funny, appalling, revelatory and moving, and epic in its scope as it traces a rogue’s progress at the interface of bohemia and criminality from the early Fifties to the Seventies. It is also an account of Keiron Pim’s determined pursuit of Litvinoff’s ghost, which took him from London to Wales and Australia in a quest to reveal one of British pop culture’s last great untold stories.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 30, 2020
It was thanks to (the wonderful) Paul Willetts that I got wind of this book. Paul tipped me off about it a few months prior to its publication. Paul had provided some help and support to Keiron Pim whilst he was writing this book about David Litvinoff (1928–75).
"David who?"
David Litvinoff was a mythic character from 1960s London who was a catalyst during that brief period when the worlds of pop, criminality, art and the aristocracy collided. He knew George Melly, the Kray twins, the Rolling Stones, Lucian Freud, Peter Rachman, Eric Clapton, and a host of other musicians, artists, criminals and aristos.
His most obvious legacy was through his role as consultant on the film 'Performance'. Keiron Pim provides compelling evidence of how significant amounts of what ended up on the screen were drawn from Litvinoff's inside information, some even drawn from personal experience.
'Performance' is ultimately just a fraction of what makes this book so fascinating and captivating. Part of the appeal lies in the extraordinary level of research Keiron Pim undertook. Litvinoff’s life left little evidence for the would be biographer. What remained were myths and unreliable memories. Keiron Pim’s challenge was to sift through these fragments and try to work out what really happened.
I loved it. From Litvinoff's early life in Bethnal Green in the 1930s to his last, man out of time, months in the mid 1970s prior to his suicide, I was absorbed and engrossed throughout. The book abounds with lots of great social history and some brilliant vignettes of a life lived at full throttle.
The book muses on both a life, and an era, and what flowed from each, variously funny and sad, light and dark. Litvinoff was a walking contradiction and a mix of the monstrous, infuriating, charming, evil, amoral, insightful, inspirational and fascinating. I finished the book with very mixed feelings about him. I was dazzled by his hustler chutzpah and passion for art and music, but also very disturbed by some cruel and dark acts. For all his gifts, he was also a bully and a sexual predator who did some very bad things.
It's a great read - and a five star biography that I heartily recommend for anyone interested in London, social history, the 1960s and interesting lives - but I cannot get some of the darker aspects of his life out of my head.
5/5
"David who?"
David Litvinoff was a mythic character from 1960s London who was a catalyst during that brief period when the worlds of pop, criminality, art and the aristocracy collided. He knew George Melly, the Kray twins, the Rolling Stones, Lucian Freud, Peter Rachman, Eric Clapton, and a host of other musicians, artists, criminals and aristos.
His most obvious legacy was through his role as consultant on the film 'Performance'. Keiron Pim provides compelling evidence of how significant amounts of what ended up on the screen were drawn from Litvinoff's inside information, some even drawn from personal experience.
'Performance' is ultimately just a fraction of what makes this book so fascinating and captivating. Part of the appeal lies in the extraordinary level of research Keiron Pim undertook. Litvinoff’s life left little evidence for the would be biographer. What remained were myths and unreliable memories. Keiron Pim’s challenge was to sift through these fragments and try to work out what really happened.
I loved it. From Litvinoff's early life in Bethnal Green in the 1930s to his last, man out of time, months in the mid 1970s prior to his suicide, I was absorbed and engrossed throughout. The book abounds with lots of great social history and some brilliant vignettes of a life lived at full throttle.
The book muses on both a life, and an era, and what flowed from each, variously funny and sad, light and dark. Litvinoff was a walking contradiction and a mix of the monstrous, infuriating, charming, evil, amoral, insightful, inspirational and fascinating. I finished the book with very mixed feelings about him. I was dazzled by his hustler chutzpah and passion for art and music, but also very disturbed by some cruel and dark acts. For all his gifts, he was also a bully and a sexual predator who did some very bad things.
It's a great read - and a five star biography that I heartily recommend for anyone interested in London, social history, the 1960s and interesting lives - but I cannot get some of the darker aspects of his life out of my head.
5/5
February 18, 2016
For me, what is there not to love about this book? In 300 or so pages, I get a bit of Jewish London history of the East End, The Krays, The Rolling Stones, and a tale of an obsessive record / music collector who was also a criminal, Francis Bacon & Lucian Freud, London Soho night life, as well as one of the leading influences of the great film "Performance." Not only that, he was hired as an advisor for the film, and hinted that perhaps (or perhaps not) wrote some of the scenes in the film. David Litvinoff is a figure who very much lived in the shadows of other people. Yet, his presence, was greatly noted in the world of the Krays as well as to the world of Eric Clapton, Stones, and the swinging London 60s. Litvinoff, was an invented character (of sorts) who was the bridge between the criminal life of London and the world of rock n' roll with a side trip to the cinema. The author, Keiron Pim, did a fantastic job in putting together this biography that couldn't have been that easy.
January 21, 2023
I decided to read this after becoming aware of David Litvinoff via Iain Sinclair's mythologising of him in books such as Rodinsky's Room (highly recommended by the way).
As this book makes clear Litvinoff socialised in 1960s London in the nexus between celebrity (associations with Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Lucien Freud and others) and the underworld of gangsters operating at that time (foremost of which were the Krays).
Litvinoff was heavily involved in both scenes without becoming famous himself although he did have a brush with fame via his involvement in the making of the classic film Performance (Litvinoff also knew Donald Cammell).
An interesting book about an elusive to pin down person
As this book makes clear Litvinoff socialised in 1960s London in the nexus between celebrity (associations with Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Lucien Freud and others) and the underworld of gangsters operating at that time (foremost of which were the Krays).
Litvinoff was heavily involved in both scenes without becoming famous himself although he did have a brush with fame via his involvement in the making of the classic film Performance (Litvinoff also knew Donald Cammell).
An interesting book about an elusive to pin down person
May 17, 2023
Undoubtely Keiron Pim put a great deal of effort into this book. This should be respected but ultimately one is left asking - why did he bother? Well, that's his business but I am the reader who found himself determined to finish something I was not enjoying from about half way through.
The problem lies partly in the subject matter - a narcissistic sociopath with attention deficit disorder who journeyed from petty crime and thuggery to being a camp follower (in both senses) of different networks of effete cultural figures. It also lies in the genre.
The genre is that of the psychogeographical exploration of London and is beginning to get tired. It once provided a mythography for the city - a plausible creative regret of its denizens at modernity much like Kenneth Grahame's regret at the loss of the Tory countryside under industrialisation.
This way of seeing which has its magical, esoteric and occult aspects elsewhere can be deeply conservative (nothing wrong with that since all have rights to self expression) but it has long since peaked culturally. It is now becoming a posture, a style, a repetition, a series of literary inventions.
This happens to all creative literary movements that once captured a moment. We saw it in Brian Dilon's The Great Explosion which we reviewed a couple of months ago. It can still give us snatches of evocative writing but the cult of selective nostalgia has perhaps now gone too far.
The central problem with the book is that Litvinoff does not stand up to scrutiny as anything more than a series of footnotes to British and latterly Australian cultural history, adding possibly unreliable details to that history but, with one exception, not himself a creator of very much.
To have influenced this or that person may be acknowledged but the effort here to turn this into 'a life as work of art' and as possible trigger for cultural change is overdone. All of us all the time influence the other magpies of humanity. Litvinoff is only remarkable for being a Zelig.
The exception is an interesting one. The book is persuasive that Litvinoff was centrally creative to the script and ambience of the culturally important Cammell and Roeg film Performance although this does not mean he created it. What he did do was contribute to a meme of power.
That meme was the intersection of criminal gangsterdom (built around the Krays), homosexuality, the arts, swinging London, rock music and the louche end of the aristocracy, a meme that persists in popular culture and reappears years later in the framing of the recent child abuse scandals.
The best of the book tells us something about the roughness of Jewish life in the East End in the 1940s, the petty criminal milieu of the 1950s and the merging of criminality, fashion and the arts in Chelsea, Mayfair and Soho in the 1960s (with a nod to its export to the Wales of Operation Julie).
But the man himself is tiresome and the author concentrates on the man - a more violent version of a type of loser we have all come across, intermittently entertaining and stimulating but with little to offer once you have decided to make something of your life on your own account.
Simply to have had a whole series of people - Lucien Freud, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Donald Cammell and various Australian artist-hippies - pass through your life and 'influence' them is not enough to be significant or important.
Does one feel sorry for a man who achieved nothing of consequence and killed himself in his late forties? At a human level, of course, but this was also a violent man who seems to have done serious life-damaging harm to his lovers and who was irresponsible for dealing drugs to kids.
The author at times seems to struggle with his own thesis (of importance) as if, having got stuck into the mystery of Litvinoff, who was far from unintelligent, he was obligated to proceed to the bitter end. Attempts to turn the book into a disquisition on the unreliability of memory fail.
Where this book succeeds, though indirectly, is in its picture of the series of milieux through which Litvinoff floated, although even here the book has to presume some belief that any particular milieu is intrinsically interesting on the part of the reader.
I happened to find the first third or so on the East End and criminality (including the Welsh LSD culture) interesting but was not over-excited by the private lives of rock gods and was actually bored by the idiocies and self-indulgence of the Sydney artistic community in the early 1970s.
However, I recognise that an Australian might reverse that pattern of interest so the book does have some merit in adding useful background to bigger stories but, in each case, these are just footnotes using our Zelig as a weak prop.
The book is scattered with transcripts from Livinoff's only major personal leavings (since he is otherwise merely an unreliable memory of others). These show a man not without intelligence but unstable, autodidactic and manipulative, a model of sometimes barely repressed bile and cruelty.
There was clearly a deep anger in this man - a concoction perhaps of early poverty, lack of opportunity and anti-semitism. He flipped into a shadow side that aped the feckless end of the aristocracy, undertook a lop-sided catalogue of obscure music and asserted difference in defiance.
There is much of interest in the psychology of the man - that is, what happens to a hyper-active a-social and opportunistic mind when it is excluded from the mainstream and learns, like any effective psychopath, to square an impulsive individualism with the wants and desires of others.
Perhaps if the book was an exploration of this personality type in mid-twentieth century society, I would have enjoyed it more but the attempt to make more of the man than he was chafed. It is as if the point was being lost throughout - the balance between loss and survival for a misfit.
July 7, 2018
On account of having left no body of work to speak of, David Litvinoff could have been forgotten—someone who did something but can't be googled, anyone? Kieron Pim has crawled the spidery global web of contacts who still remembered the man to bring us this artefact: a book, a biography, something we can google. The point is to reveal aspects of 60s connections that wove previously distant British classes and social milieus together in chaotic and public ways. And it helps us to understand the arc of the Absolute Beginners of the 50s to the JetSet Rockstars of the 70s. Most of those artists had pretty difficult 80s and it seems like he could sense that coming. David Litvinoff's identity as a homosexual Jewish gangster flits like a shadow through the cultural hotspots of the 60s, gleefully blurring the dark and the light. A fascinating story of a story too.
April 21, 2016
A biography which, in its scope and breadth, serves as a fascinating history of Victorian through mid-Seventies London, with David Litvinoff as its central figure. Existing in the shadows, Litvinoff rearranged 1960s London society through having connected Chelsea aristocracy [Jagger, Clapton], Soho bohemians [Freud, Bacon] and East End criminality [Reggie, Ronnie], often finding himself running from or suffering the consequences of the results. Lovingly researched, imminently readable, Keiron Pim has set the bar incredibly high, delivering much more than promised.
January 20, 2016
Fascinating tour of the countercultures & subcultures of the 60s & 70s in the company of the mercurial & threatening mystery that is David Litvinoff.
July 16, 2017
Keiron Pim's meticulously investigated piece of « deep cartography » is an unmissable must-read for anybody interested in rifling through London's post-war bins. And, like a polymathic pea beneath the capital's multi-mattressed past, the umbrageous grot that is David Litvinoff is presented with pinprick precision. Loved it and thoroughly recommend it.
February 28, 2021
David Litvinoff is one of those shadowy figures whose name crops up repeatedly in accounts of Soho, Chelsea, and the East End in the fifties and sixties. Gay and Jewish, at a time when being neither was much of a social asset, he was the subject of one of Lucian Freud's most celebrated early portraits, associate of notorious gangsters the Kray Twins, friend of Clapton and Jagger and the Cammell brothers (he is credited as "Technical Advisor and Dialogue Consultant" on Performance) and a host of other luminaries. We meet "Mad" Frankie Fraser, Jack "the Spot" Comer and Jack the Hat McVitie among other villains, most of whom have the soubriquet "Mad" attached to their given names.
One of his friends describes Litvinoff thus:
"‘He was a delightful, charming, fascinating, mildly deranged – occasionally totally deranged – starter-up of people,’ said Gibbs. ‘A prodder and goader and winder-upper."
Litvinoff was famously averse to leaving any documentary evidence of his existence, even going so far as to steal and destroy his own military service records, which makes the task of the biographer horrendously difficult. Pim does a brilliant job of not only putting flesh on the bones of this most elusive of ghosts but also painting a wonderfully evocative picture of a bygone era.
One of his friends describes Litvinoff thus:
"‘He was a delightful, charming, fascinating, mildly deranged – occasionally totally deranged – starter-up of people,’ said Gibbs. ‘A prodder and goader and winder-upper."
Litvinoff was famously averse to leaving any documentary evidence of his existence, even going so far as to steal and destroy his own military service records, which makes the task of the biographer horrendously difficult. Pim does a brilliant job of not only putting flesh on the bones of this most elusive of ghosts but also painting a wonderfully evocative picture of a bygone era.
January 3, 2017
It's a real trend at the moment to use the biography of a minor figure to illustrate an age and the elusive David Litvinoff is the avatar for the Swinging Sixties of London in this amusing, elegantly written and impeccably researched volume. As ever, it's the anecdotes that win out - Litvinoff had varying levels of contact with Lucian Freud, Mick Jagger (he was involved in the movie Performance ), Eric Clapton and the Krays so the material is rich - while one is once again left wondering how we all became so boring over subsequent decades.
That said, Litvinoff was far from a figure to envy - coming across as a big child most of all - although his background of a Jewish émigré family is fascinating indeed and the influence of this ever present throughout his life. Later chapters that take place in Wales and Australia are less fulfilling but in all, it's a fine volume from Pim.
That said, Litvinoff was far from a figure to envy - coming across as a big child most of all - although his background of a Jewish émigré family is fascinating indeed and the influence of this ever present throughout his life. Later chapters that take place in Wales and Australia are less fulfilling but in all, it's a fine volume from Pim.
December 8, 2016
Fascinating and incredibly well researched and written.
January 14, 2024
if you prise up just some minor flagstone of culture, you are likely to be surprised by the richness and strangeness of the life that writhes beneath. P337 Quoting Alan Moore
October 25, 2025
Incredibly sensitive and well-researched, a really good read for anyone interested in london’s history, specifically British Jewish history, as well as any artist or curator struggling to make sense of their place in the world. Quite horrifying and hard to read at moments, being faced with abject violence, but Keiron is so good at reflecting on his own position as the author that you feel grounded in the reality of a liberal mid 2010s perspective, which helps you process the consequences of the intensity of Litvinoff’s behaviour. Overall extremely engaging writing, I’ve immediately ordered his biography of Joseph Roth (despite having never heard of him before). This book has also left me with so many references of films to watch and books to go read! I couldn’t recommend it more highly tbh.
April 29, 2019
Brilliant, a real page turner
January 11, 2022
Knowledgeable and well written
September 3, 2017
Hate to do it but I'm going to have to bin this one. This should have been a magazine article at best. Instead the author has gone to incredible lengths to cover a very minor character who is not particularly interesting and certainly not worth all the academic foot notes he includes on every other page- this is't Winston Churchill. In theory I should have loved this book since it covers many areas of interest for me, but trying to read the microscopic print which is basically saying nothing about a nobody is neither fun not educational. In a word- tedious, save your money and head over to Robert Greenfield's books which are actually smart, original and entertaining page turners about many of the same characters. Like another reviewer said "why did he bother".
January 17, 2017
Intricate, absorbing and damn interesting biography...More so even than the usual pieces written about the more famous 'stars' of the era. A real slice of a set of/in the times.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews