Welcome to the world of writer CJ Stone

CJ Stone became a writer and has kept at it, sharing his world with his readers.

CJ Stone's approach is to write it as he sees it, or remembers it - he calls it his "bugs 'n' all" style of writing. I would compare him with following in the tradition of the American "Beats", the poets and authors who lived in an alternative lifestyle and wrote it down for the world to read. One of CJ's heros is Hunter S. Thompson and I can see why.

CJ first got his "big break" as a regular columnist in The Guardian newspaper, where his Housing Benefit Hill quickly gained a cult-following at the time with its tales of people he knew and had met, doing whatever they had to do to get by in Britain. His stories were compiled and republished several years later in the book Housing Benefit Hill, published by AK Press.

From his success with the national newspaper CJ Stone soon got a publishing deal with Faber and Faber, who published his first book Fierce Dancing - Adventures in the Underground in 1996. In it CJ takes a detailed look at the alternative lifestyle in the UK and what those who had been influenced by the '60s were doing in the '90s.

In Fierce Dancing, CJ Stone delves into what happened to the free festivals and the culture that went with them. He writes of the notorious Battle of the Beanfield and the police brutality to the New Age travellers at Stonehenge. He meets with and interviews drummer Penny Rimbaud of the influential anarcho-punk band Crass, as well as doing likewise with rock musician Nik Turner, most famous for his song Silver Machine that Hawkwind had a smash hit with.

But the book opens with CJ's first rave party and his experience with Ecstasy. Around that time he was a regular columnist for Mix Mag popular dance and rave-culture magazine too.

CJ Stone's next book was The Last of the Hippies, which was his quest to find out what had happened to a character we both knew and who was known as Piss Off Pete. Pete was an acid-casualty in many ways. Pete was one of many that the '60s lifestyle hadn't helped. He was one who had turned on, tuned in and dropped out, to quote the Tim Leary slogan, all the way, and sadly had ended up in a mental hospital.

In The Last of the Hippies, CJ never does find out what happened to Pete but he takes the reader with him on his journey of investigation along the way. There are his experiences at Glastonbury Festival and of meeting with the British druids, as well as his quest to meet the man believed to be the renincarnated King Arthur.