The life of a gigolo is not always easy – take today. The gentleman concerned, who goes by the nickname of “Golden”, is painfully hungover. Somehow, last night, between assignments with lovely laydeez in Notting Hill and a French bar in Soho, he sucked up too much champagne, and now his eyes are just a teeny bit pink, his nose is red, and his thoughts are proving tricky to marshal.

His luncheon venue of choice is the Sanderson, a fashionable London hotel with overdesigned food and fancy Voss water from Norway which, we agree, tastes of pond. “Only one thing for it,” says Golden, and orders rosé wine all round. He perks up.

Golden is here to talk about his memoir, Gigolo, and his art. The book, heavily aimed at women, is ghostwritten in rampant bonkbuster style. From the text, you instinctively conjure up a clichéd image of a Beckhamesque, bronzed, blinging, bodacious blond. Instead an educated, lanky man of 30 with dark floppy hair shows up, who could easily, say, work in a bookshop. There’s something curiously Eighties about his attire: a creamy linen jacket, skinny Levi’s, and white tennis shoes. In his spare time, Golden is a jazz pianist.

“Well, no one can afford to be a jazz piano player… it’s moribund as a career. I’m not going to make real money doing that, am I?” No, but he could sell pizza rather than pulchritude to fund his music. So why is he a gigolo, accepting – he insists – not money but goods and good times in kind from women for his magnificent efforts in bed?

He sees himself not as a prostitute, but as a species of modern dandy. “It began as a gradual thing, trial and error. I wanted to avoid the nine-to-five life at all costs… and I love partying.” Golden came from what he describes as a working-class family in Woking and the Isle of Wight to London to do a degree in jazz at Middlesex University. There, he plunged deep into the capital’s nightlife, DJing, carousing and looking for new opportunities. “A lot of things go on behind the scenes in the music world.”

So the student who started out as Greg then acquired the name Golden or Golden Boy, a moniker which immediately encourages lightheartedness in any encounter. The name informs of the trade, without unnecessary, embarrassing discussion.

“It was all happenstance. I went from the jazz bistro to clubs to Sketch to Boujis to hang out and eat. You get into patterns and London can be a very small place, the same circuit of people.” Boujis is rather favoured by the young Royals, is it not? “I’ve never seen either of them there. I don’t go that often. It’s all paparazzi hype with these places.”

Instead Golden prefers a more discreet life, as do his clients, who – he says – are mostly women in their thirties. “The difference is that they are wealthier, more powerful, with more disposable income than most women in their twenties.” In the early Eighties, when Richard Gere’s American Gigolo hit the screens, a handsome young man’s clientele was incredibly wealthy, but now Golden finds career women who are too busy to sustain a relationship also calling him on his mobile, which buzzes like an excited hamster in his pocket. “I provide the fun and frolics, she provides the credit card. Sometimes I go into a local restaurant three days running with three different women and order the same Dom Pérignon. I get strange looks from the waiter.”

The book opens with him picking up a Hampstead estate agent after their eyes meet over ads for multi-million pound stucco mansions. Her pseudonym in the book is “Ms Antoinette”. She is, of course, rather feisty. “If someone at work told me I wasn’t allowed to do something because I’m a woman, I’d sue them – why should sex be any different?” Ms Antoinette, or perhaps a savvy ghostwriter, asks.

Golden seems comfortable with the idea that he is the perfect accessory. His lovely ladies have self-explanatory names and appear to be from central casting: Trustfundista in London, Celebrity X in New York, Miss Heiress in Paris and Miss Alpha, a hedge-fund investor. A kept man, kept by many women, he is on the receiving end of the medicine women have tasted for years. “I felt it was something that us postmodern men might have to get used to,” he says.

In a Pretty Woman turns on Pretty Boy scene, the businesslike Miss Alpha tells Golden, “You’re my plaything,” and he has to take her belittling on the chin as she rings up a $20,000 bill for his clothes in Saks Fifth Avenue, New York. Miss Alpha is equally proactive between the sheets. There are other women with even stranger tastes, subjects inappropriate for a family newspaper on a Saturday morning.

One of the more interesting encounters is when Golden is picked up by a £1,000-a-night professional lap dancer, in a chapter entitled “Men Can Lap Dance Too”. (None of this is ideal reading on the Tube.) Gyrating, Miss Stripper immediately sees Golden for what he is. He sticks out like a sore thumb in a room of slavering men. She tells him, inevitably, that “I’ve got a feeling your biggest bulge isn’t in your wallet.” In the end, they retire to Miss Stripper’s tasteful home in the suburbs, and the situation is summed up when Miss gives £300 in £50 bills, still warm from her garter, to Golden.