He was a founder member of Television and Johnny Thunders’ band The Heartbreakers, is credited for helping set up the stage at legendary New York venue CBGBs, and wrote the seminal punk anthem Blank Generation.

As Richard Hell pays a rare visit to Brighton – what he thinks may be his first since touring in the 1970s – the surprise is really that the now full-time novelist hasn’t written his memoirs before.

“It was time to write another book and I kind of deluded myself that this would be easier than making up a story,” says Hell, talking about his autobiography I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, which is set for release as an import edition in the UK later this year.

“I had been wondering what the way I spent my time and youth amounted to. I wished I could see it in one sweep, and I was curious to look at it that way.”

Reading extracts from publishers Harper Collins, it’s clear he hasn’t pulled his punches or censored the way he has presented himself.

There are references to his habit of running away from home while growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, early schoolboy fantasies about the girls in his class and examination of his teenage masturbation before he even hits the New York of the late 1960s.

“I don’t pretty up the way I describe, for instance, what sexual encounters were like for me as a teenager,” he says. “I don’t pretend they were other than what they were. I regard it as normal – if you were to describe what was really going on inside a person when they’re manoeuvring to get someone to agree to have sex with them, it wouldn’t be very generous.

Speaking from experience

“It isn’t pretty, but it is the kind of behaviour which is common to everybody – we all recognise it if we’re honest with ourselves.”

He admits that there were a lot of ugly things that happened in his life.

“As a writer you have this kind of magic opportunity to redeem yourself simply by describing things,” he says. “They somehow get some value which they wouldn’t have had otherwise – I guess I’m trying to cheat my way to decency!”

In an event initiated and organised by the University Of Sussex's Centre For American Studies and co-sponsored by The Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies and the School of Media, Film, and Music, Hell will be reading from his new book, as well as some of his older works, and taking questions.

He admits today that he wasn’t suited to life as a musician.

“I was more solitary,” he says. “As a novelist I don’t have responsibility to anybody else, I don’t have to be on the road for nine months of the year.

“I don’t think of the book as a music memoir – it’s my autobiography. A large section of it has to do with the music scene in New York, which happens to be where I ended up.

“It was ten years of my life – and those ten years up to your late 20s tend to be the most intense time in people’s lives. It’s when you’re the most adventurous, trying to find out what the limits are.

“I spent those years in music – and I was really glad to put it behind me because it almost destroyed me. I would never have been able to write this book at any point during that time for sure – I didn’t have any capacity for sustained focus on anything!”

He admits when he finally released his seminal first album Blank Generation with his band The Voidoids that he was already fed up with the music scene.

“That was four or five years after I first ever tried to play bass or write a song,” he says. “I struggled on for five years or so, doing things I’m perfectly proud of, writing more songs, recording a little bit, but I was already worn out for many years before I finally took the decisive step and just left.”

Stopping his drug use coincided with his decision to stop being a musician.

“I knew I had to focus on taking care of myself,” he says. “Trying to do something in music would have prevented me.”

He admits in the early days he loved both the freedom of expression in writing songs, and the chance to work up a sweat performing them on stage.

But although he had a front row seat in seeing the development of the US punk scene at the late lamented Bowery venue CBGBs – original home to the likes of The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and his schoolfriend Tom Verlaine’s band Television – he never really appreciated how big the scene had become.

“They will always be the bands that were there night after night when I was living at CBGBs,” he says. “CBGBs held a maximum of 300 people in that room – that was my whole relationship, understanding and knowledge. I don’t know about what happened once those bands became popular and got out.”

Once he left the music business behind he focused on writing novels – and characteristically threw himself into the experience.

“I like to do a book that requires I learn about some subject or has a background that I need to get a grip on,” says Hell, who is currently working on what he describes as “a romance noir”.

“It helps me find my way through the book.

“My first novel [Go Now] was a road novel – I ended up driving across the US back and forth three times before the book came out, because I wanted to be sure I had the feeling of driving.

“My second novel [Godlike] was this funny mixture of a riff on the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, but set in 1970s New York, so I did all this research on Verlaine and Rimbaud and the 1970s period – particularly the literary scene.

“It helps to get the details and atmosphere of the book right, but it’s a slow process,” he adds, pointing to the five-year gaps between his books.”Getting the first draft is hard work – it takes so much focus. Slashing away the parts that aren’t so good and trying to make something solid is the part I really like.”

  • An Evening With Richard Hell, Jubilee Lecture Theatre, University Of Sussex, Falmer, Tuesday, February 4
  • Starts 6pm, SOLD OUT. For returns, visit www.sussex.ac.uk/bookalecture