Edie Sedgwick

So I went to see Factory Girl, and I do recommend it, only if you're a Warhol aficionado though, everyone else will be wondering what all the fuss is about I suspect.

See, we had a little Edie Sedgwick history. When we were teens, one of our friends was given a book about her by a music journo/sixties pop culture obsessive (who went on to be in a sixties- influenced Britpop band/DJ duo - and can I just say, at the time she was 15, you were 24 - you dirty old man!)

It was 'Edie: An American Biography' by Jean Stein, and is an absolutely monumental biography, even if you have no interest whatsoever in music, pop art, New York, the sixties, Warhol, Dylan, or even Edie Sedgwick herself.

Because it was assembled and edited through hours of interviews with different people who knew her and is all told through direct speech, and gives you such a clear picture of that time and place, and that particular human being's trajectory. You get to hear so many different voices and slants on the sixties era. It's a multi-faceted portrait, and you wonder why anyone would ever write a biography in any other way. (though you can see where the problems might arise with Shakespeare, say, or Elizabeth I.)

To make a long story short, she was from a rich, privileged high society American family with a monstrous Dostoyevskian father who was sexually abusing his eight children, two of whom committed suicide and one (Edie) who escaped to art school, then New York and eventually, into drugs.

I got interested in Pop Art through reading it (and listening to the Velvet's Banana album) and ended up doing a dissertation on Warhol at school, even dragging my long-suffering friends to see his unwatchable films at the Tate (Chelsea Girls, I seem to recall, not the notorious Empire State, I'm not that cruel.)

The film is a poor shadow of the book, though Sienna Miller is wonderful - she doesn't have Edie Sedgwick's huge eyes or charisma but she makes her vulnerable and real. And the detail is uncanny - Andy Warhol's stripey breton tops, Factory hangers-on like Ondine or Gerard Malanga who are identical to their real-life characters, I even remember certain hats or earrings she wore from stills in the book which they've tracked down.

It is pretty harsh on poor Warhol, whose only sin I think was in being superficial, and pretty easy on Dylan (who wrote Just Like a Woman, Leopardskin Pillbox Hat and - I reckon - Like A Rolling Stone about her - and Lou Reed wrote Femme Fatale about her, we think) who just shagged her and moved on. But then, one of them is no longer in a position to sue.

Poor Edie. She overdosed at 28. But when you look at the pictures and films, her fascination is in the fact that she looks almost child-like, you couldn't have imagined her getting old. Though she was such a vibrant character, that if you read the book or see the film you can still feel the shock waves people must have felt originally when she died.

Years ago in an ill-fated stint as PR bunny at the publishers, I had to take an author to review 'I Shot Andy Warhol', as he'd worked for Warhol as editor at his Interview magazine in the eighties. I was wanting to hear stories of glamour and gossip, but he was most dismissive of everything we'd been so fascinated with as teenagers. 'He was just really cold. It was just a really shallow horrible scene...'

True enough, but still somehow fascinating...