Iain Sinclair is often amusingly self-deprecating about his “mad quests” to trace the occult energies that he detects charging through the landscape of London. This pursuit of the legend of David Litvinoff is a fine example, and it’s one of my favourite pieces of his writing. Sinclair’s psychogeographical prose has illuminated London for me in so many ways, but this piece has especial meaning as it inspired my book Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld. In summer 2010 I happened to take two books on holiday with me, Rodinsky’s Room and Journey Through a Small Planet, a memoir of growing up in Whitechapel in the 1930s by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I mentioned earlier. I didn’t know there was any connection between the two, so when I read them both I was struck by the coincidence.

Sinclair’s beguiling chapter on David Litvinoff in Rodinsky’s Room piqued my interest in the life of the ‘Chelsea chancer’ who connected the worlds of rock music, fine art and criminality in 1950s and ’60s London. From a few clues – acquaintances’ faded memories, rumours of revelatory diaries, tapes of Litvinoff in telephone conversation with a Welsh vagrant who may have been the model for Mac Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker – Sinclair spins up the legend of this man whom he saw as a conduit to a hidden London, but whose life was untraceable.

He makes the story sound tantalisingly impossible to tell, full of unprovable rumours and dead-ends: it was hard to find anyone who remembered Litvinoff, he claims, as “the price of membership of that exclusive club seemed to be burn-out, premature senility or suicide”. That turned out not to be strictly true – through some good old-fashioned journalistic legwork I found plenty of sane and healthy people who shared their memories with me – but the way Sinclair captures the madness and melancholy of Litvinoff’s life was fundamental to starting me off on my own mad quest. This isn’t a short story in conventional terms, of course, but it’s an abbreviated story of Litvinoff’s life that captures his brilliance and weird allure, and it’s the beginning of the story of how I became fascinated by him.

First published in Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Granta, 1999