THE FIRST time I saw the Manhattan skyline, I was 23 and a reporter on a Sunday magazine. Speeding across the Queensboro Bridge in a yellow taxi, I was on my way to interview an ageing rock star — I’ll call him Mr Big — with a Greatest Hits album to promote and a career to revive. And I was about to fulfil a lifelong ambition by staying at the Chelsea hotel, where Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen made love, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy to death. It was, apparently, the only hotel edgy enough for Mr Big to be interviewed in.

The next morning, I waited in my room for the call. And waited. And waited. After five hours, a flunkey arrived to tell me that Mr Big was in the building, but wasn’t in the mood for journalists. I had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, afraid to stray more than 5ft from a house phone. The next day was the same.

I was almost in tears.

At 5pm on the third and last day, I was finally granted an audience. I placed my tape recorder between us, and asked him my meticulously researched questions. He didn’t make eye contact with me once. He was surly and truculent but, after waiting for three days, I wasn’t going to let him get away with the same old pap, and eventually got some juicy, exclusive gossip about his equally famous former wife and his new love, a supermodel.

To celebrate, I had a martini in the trendy bar underneath the Chelsea. As the bar filled up with an elegantly wasted crowd, my attention focused on a beautiful youth with an unkempt mop of black hair, skinny jeans and a battered leather jacket. We got chatting: I told him I’d just interviewed Mr Big and his eyes widened underneath his floppy fringe. His name was Joey, he was at film school in New York, and he was Mr Big’s greatest fan. He implored me to let him listen to the interview: I said I would if he bought me another martini.

We couldn’t hear the tape over the din of music and chat in the bar, so he suggested we listen to it in his room at the YMCA. We bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a packet of Marlboro Red at the liquor store next door to Joey’s hostel and went upstairs.

When I woke up, parched and headachy at 5.30am, I kissed my sleeping conquest, whispered that it had been beautiful (and meant it), grabbed my things, jumped in a cab with wild hair and laddered tights and sped through New York as dawn broke, feeling like the star of a Patti Smith video. I showered, checked out and made the flight with seconds to spare.

A few days later, I was back in the office, very pleased with my interview as well as my conquest. I popped on the headphones and prepared to transcribe my nuggets of rock’n’roll chitchat. To my horror, instead of Mr Big’s voice, the sounds of two people having hot sex in a New York YMCA emanated from the Dictaphone. Clearly, one of us had hit the “record” button in the heat of the moment. I had to write the interview from memory, but Joey’s boundless energy and eagerness to please had, I reckoned, been worth risking career suicide for.

And yes, I’ve still got the tape. As souvenirs go, it surely beats an I (Heart) New York T-shirt.