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Norman Mailer interview

His 35 books and more than 300 interviews litter the past 60 years like milestones in the formulation of America's literary life. Incendiary, ground breaking, exhilarating and, sometimes, quite awful, his work is nothing if not controversial. His latest - an obsessive portrait of the young Hitler - is set to unleash a fairly typical fire-storm of protest. Norman Mailer can hardly wait ...

Norman Mailer says people are 'going to have a shit fit' over his new novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolph Hitler, narrated by a devil, inhabiting the body of an SS officer, Dieter. 'At a given point,' he says, 'you snicker to yourself and you say, "Oh, they're going to be livid."' The writer seems unfazed by this inevitability. 'It's impossible not to identify to some small degree with the protagonist [Hitler], so the book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews. They won't like it. The right wing will hate it. God not all-powerful? Not all-loving? I expect there'll be considerable resistance,' he goes on with glee. 'And a lot of radicals are not going to like it, because most radicals believe that to talk about God and the Devil is retrogressive.' Add up the Jews, the fundamentalists, the radicals and what he calls 'the Acumenarians', an especially low form of critical life in Mailer's world, and he's just about to alienate most of America. So why does he do it?

That's a question people have been asking about Norman Mailer for more than half a century. Probably, we are still as far as ever from an answer. But in the process of a prolonged and often raucous public self-examination, Mailer has become a contemporary figure of myth, a great American icon who is venerated and reviled but impossible to ignore. Indeed, so complex has Mailer's legend become that even now there are at least three obstacles to elucidating this protean survivor from the lost world of Forties America.
First, there's the man himself. How many Norman Mailers can you interview? Let's see. There's the wild narrator; the 'psychic outlaw'; the 'generous but very spoiled boy'; and the 'criminal egomaniac'. Turn to a ziggurat of Mailer volumes, approximately 35 titles, and you find the author of several classics of mid- to late-20th-century American prose: The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song. And some of the worst, too: Of Women and their Elegance, Tough Guys Don't Dance and The Gospel According to the Son. Coming on to the ever-present question of sex (leaving aside the mistresses and girlfriends), there's also Mailer, the husband of Bea, Adele, Jeanne, Beverly, Carol and Norris (four wives before he was 40; number two notoriously stabbed with a penknife), the alimony slave and the father of eight, or possibly nine, children. Finally, there's the doting grandfather of 10 grandchildren, to whom he has dedicated The Castle in the Forest.

Who else might you want to question? Other potential Mailers include the producer-director of three of American cinema's most bizarre films (Beyond the Law, Wild 90 and Maidstone); the amateur boxer who sparred with Ryan O'Neal; the starry political commentator who took tea with Jackie and JFK; the mayoral candidate for New York City (1969); the dazzling Harvard graduate; the Second World War veteran and, before that, in the beginning, the middle-class Jew from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. His friend and one-time publisher, Jason Epstein, talks affectionately of 'good Norman' and 'bad Norman', the good and the bad co-existing heroically and unquenchably over nearly six decades of literary life on a scale unknown in Britain and rare in America, too. In the words of the New York novelist and critic James Atlas, 'Norman Mailer is one of the great originals that our chaotic culture throws off from time to time.'

Good or bad, he doesn't want to be pinned down. The Naked and the Dead bore an epigraph from Andre Gide, 'Do not understand me too quickly', and there's also the smoke screen of his many aliases: 'Aquarius'; 'Mailer' and/or 'Norman'; 'Kid Integrity' and 'General Marijuana' of the Village Voice, the paper he co-founded in 1955; 'the Reporter' of the Sixties magazine journalism; 'PW' (for 'prizewinner' or possibly 'prisoner of wedlock'), or 'the Acolyte' in The Prisoner of Sex, his Seventies scrap with the women's movement. This, notoriously, he described as destined to be 'fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in manneqin's whimsy, or else bright and stillborn'.

And here's the second difficulty in any evaluation of the man Epstein dubs 'America's Byron'. Not only has he lived all these lives and written all these books, he's talked with incandescent brilliance about his life and work to anyone who'll listen. In the English language alone, he's conducted so many interviews (more than 300) that the best of them are actually published in book form (Conversations with Norman Mailer). And he's still at it. As The Castle in the Forest approaches simultaneous publication in Britain and America, he is meeting the press yet again, talking, and laughing, and charming, and then talking some more.

If he wasn't such an enthralling conversationalist, you'd call the man a world champion narcissist. But he'll always beat you to that punch. As he wrote in his Esquire interview with Madonna in 1994: 'There is nothing comparable to living with a phenomenon when the phenomenon is you and you observe yourself with a cool intelligence, your own, and yet are trapped in the cruellest pit of the narcissist - you not only are more interested in yourself than anyone else alive, but suffer from the likely suspicion that this might be justified. You could be more interesting than anyone you've encountered.'

He knows that these interviews are his Achilles heel. 'If I'm given too many allowances,' he said in 1961, 'I'll do exactly the sort of charming, thin thing that's good at the moment, but doesn't transcribe.' In his prime, his instinct with interviews was to be 'superficial, but quick', and above all, 'diverting'. He is, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, never less than 'intensely pleasurable'. Mailer's obiter dicta range from the observation that 'Hemingway's style affected a whole generation, the way a roomful of men is affected when a beautiful woman walks through - their night is turned for better or for worse' to the infinitely teasing notion that 'the best presidential contest we could have would be between Warren Beatty for the Democrats and Clint Eastwood for the Republicans'.

Mailer has talked on TV, on campuses, in bars, at cocktail parties, on and off the record, with and without cigars and cigarettes. He has been drunk, stoned and sober, endlessly quoted and misquoted. That rapid-fire, streetwise Brooklyn voice, at once urgent and seductive, has ceaselessly supplied what he calls 'the blue netherworld of answers' to 'the black netherworld of questions'. (Not coincidentally, he has also poured the ferrocast cement of interview material into his masterpiece, The Executioner's Song.) Mailer can play interviewers like a saloon-bar pianist. Which brings us to the third, and possibly final, hurdle in the analysis of the man. Answer the conundrum of the 'Who?' and the 'How?' and you still have to overcome the 'Where?'

Depending on the season, you are summoned to his apartment in Brooklyn, or his summer residence on Cape Cod. In a princely ritual, intermediaries and assistants negotiate the arrangements. The audience is granted, the questions entertained and the tumultuous record defended. Away you go with your precious hour of audio tape to compose your portrait. Hierophants of this well-honed genre will know that the view from Mailer's Brooklyn address is a teeming panorama of lower Manhattan: the Staten Island ferry, the thudding helicopters and a dizzying view of Ellis island, that chaotic portal to the American dream his grandparents crossed in the 1890s. As Melvyn Bragg puts it, 'Mailer has welded himself to the contemporary consciousness of his country, and there it is outside his window in all its fantasy, greed and glory: facing him.'

Never mind the fall of the Twin Towers, that view is not quite what it was. Mailer has just slipped into his 85th year, and he's hoarding his dwindling resources. Time, for so long prodigally at his disposal, is no longer his friend. In Auden's words, like 'the rumble of distant thunder at a picnic', there is the approach of that ultimate reckoning. Bellow, Heller, Styron and Miller have already gone. Apart from Vonnegut and Vidal, neither in the best of health, Mailer is the last of the Mohicans.

Like so many great artists in the home stretch, more and more of his working life is devoted to working at home, in Provincetown. Perhaps a secular pilgrimage will unlock a hidden door into the Mailer mysteries. Provincetown has a special place in Mailer's life. He's raised families here, had fights, got arrested, conducted love affairs and, far from the siren song of New York, written millions of words. Provincetown has seen six decades of Norman Mailer.

It's a long drive to the uttermost end of Cape Cod, under grey winter skies. The civilisation of the East Coast falls away as the route unwinds into the elemental bleakness of this strange fish-hook of pine woods, gravel and cranberry bog. After two hours, the highway is just a two-way ribbon running along the crest of scrubby dunes, with the wild ocean to the east, and bleak inland water to the west. Just as you despair of journey's end, there's a final switch in the road and in front of you is a jumble of dirty white clapboard houses, the former whaling town of P-town, as the locals call it.

Provincetown perfectly reflects good and bad Mailer. Tranquil, normal, white and sunwashed, it can present a face as welcome as seaside ice cream. But down the back alleys and twisting streets, it becomes darker, more furtive and provisional, with an out-of-season impermanence. Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos, Kurt Vonnegut and Edmund Wilson, among many others, have all succumbed to the sinister charm of P-town. To the artists, homosexuals, writers and intellectuals who have colonised it for more than a century, it has been, in Mailer's exuberant phrase, 'the Wild West of the East'. In the Sixties, bikers would roar into town on a Saturday night. There were fights and parties on the beach. In the dunes there was drinking, drugs and a lot of marriages broken. According to Mailer, 'At least 10 times a summer you'd see the sun coming up over the flats.'

There's no sun today, just an unearthly twilight and the wind off the winter sea. The address on Commercial Street is perched on the very edge of the Atlantic, gabled, dark and veined with ivy root, like the deserted house in a horror movie. Its solitary red-brick demeanour is further emphasised by the low clapboard dwellings on either side. On the approach to the front door, across shards of shells and sea glass, there's a single yellow lamp glowing behind a downstairs window. Mailer's house certainly feels like a sanctuary for a writer who has devoted his life to wrestling with demons.

The warring elements in the quest for Mailer resolve themselves the moment you cross his threshold. His publicist ushers you into a spacious downstairs parlour with a stunning ocean view. The clutter of his long life is rather Edwardian: tables of framed photographs - Norman with his wives, children and grandchildren; portraits of Norman as a young god; books, magazines and bric-a-brac; rugs, old chairs and candlesticks. The huge picture window gives on to a deck and a rocking chair, facing the grey immensity of the Atlantic. Sitting here in 1620, you could have watched the Pilgrim Fathers making landfall in the New World.

The trim, elfin figure of Mailer himself is in a kind of antechamber to one side, concentrating on self-composure for another photographer. The atmosphere is dim and quasi-religious. Mailer himself is as still and enigmatic as an icon: tiny, white-haired and waxy under the lights. Another surprise: he looks much more Irish than Jewish. When the photo session is over he gets to his feet with difficulty, supported by two canes, and moves to greet me, sadly diminished by arthritis. He's quite deaf, too, and repeats my introduction in some puzzlement.

'Colin?' he queries, using the English pronunciation (his father, Barney, spoke South African English).

Is he, I wonder, conferring a Maileresque alter ego? Will 'Colin' be permitted to ask the questions that 'McCrum' cannot? But no, he's simply a little old man, hard of hearing, making sense of another intrusion into his private life. All at once I realise that the complicated set of questions I have researched in advance will not survive that painful hybrid of mime and raised decibels that dominates the dialogue with the deaf. Anyway, before we get to my questions, he has one of his own, journalist-to-journalist. 'Let me ask you,' he says, 'they sent you over here by plane?'

'Yes.'

'Yeah. Who else are you doing?' (The old pro knows the ways of the international press.)

'Just you.' (I'm trying to articulate my words without, instinctively, raising my voice.) 'I've just come to see you.'

'Wow! I believe you liked the book.'

The truth is that I have been baffled, moved, exasperated and occasionally dismayed by The Castle in the Forest, an obsessive portrait of young Hitler and his brutal, incestuous family. Like much of his work, it contains the best and the worst of his prose in jarring juxtaposition. As Mailer himself writes, it is 'more than a memoir, but privileged as a novel. To specify the genre does not really matter since my largest concern is not literary form, but my fear of the consequences.' Once again, the new book is Exhibit A, a primary clue in the inquiry into the Mailer conundrum.

With Mailer, fiction and autobiography are one. As with any old man, his mind's default position is childhood. 'In 1932,' he remembers, 'my mother knew Hitler was going to be a disaster for the Jews. So Hitler was with me from the time I was nine. I've spent time thinking about him all my life. What was that man made of? I've always been fascinated. He was an order of evil that can't be understood.'

Exhilarating and vertiginous leaps of thought are typical of Mailer's conversation. 'Hitler violated the boundaries of the Enlightenment,' he goes on. 'There is nothing in the wisdom of the Enlightenment that enables you to understand Hitler. He goes beyond all measure.' Suddenly Mailer's Jewishness becomes part of his analysis. 'You know,' he says, 'the real damage Hitler did to the Jews, after killing six million, was to wreck the minds of the survivors. Before Hitler, the Jewish mind was more inquiring and much more elegant.'

Mailer's Jewishness is only one key to his personality, but a vital one. Born on 31 January 1923, young Norman was raised in Brooklyn during the Twenties and Thirties, the first and only son of second-generation Russian Jews. The Mailer side of the family came to the USA via Johannesburg and the Great War. Mailer's father, Barney, 'a bit of an Edwardian', with a South African accent Mailer likes to mimic, trained as an accountant, and fought in the trenches with the South African army. After the Great War he emigrated to the States where he met and married Fanny Schneider in 1922. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born the following year.

The boy grew up surrounded by aunts and nurtured by his mother's love. It was Fanny (Fan) who saved his earliest stories, written at the age of eight, and spoke of him as something special. The devilry was all in the future. In a conventional Jewish Brooklyn childhood, his single moment of rebellion was to quote Spinoza at his Bar Mitzvah. His adolescent drives were absorbed in his writing. He was apparently a brilliant young man. With Europe on the brink of war, he made the almost unimaginable step of going to Harvard, initially to study aeronautical engineering.

'I grew up in this sheltered Jewish environment,' he says. 'There was an immense shift of my young identity in going from Brooklyn to Harvard.' It was, he remembers, an 'incredible shift: of course you don't even know what's going on'. He had jumped six or seven steps up the American class ladder, and found himself temporarily out of his depth. At Harvard, he encountered anti-Semitism for the first time, and, not coincidentally, he collided with his vocation. He had known as early as 17 or 18 that he wanted to be a writer. Now he was subjecting his writing to the scrutiny of classmates and professors.

Didier Drogba Interview

I love England. If only my son wouldn't wear an Arsenal shirt.

In a troubled season for Chelsea, Didier Drogba has been outstanding. He speaks exclusively to Brian Oliver about the pain of growing up far from home, what it means to be an African icon - and one slight family problem ...

Didier Drogba has spent most of his life on the move. The longest he has lived continuously in one place is five years, and those were the first five years of his life in the country of his birth, Ivory Coast. Since then, he has moved 14 more times. He can remember them all, but none as vividly as the first: when, in 1983, he was sent to live with an uncle in France.

Michel Goba, who was a professional footballer, persuaded Drogba's parents that the move would 'give Didier a chance in life'. So Drogba left behind a country where life expectancy in the 21st century is 30 years lower than it is in Britain, where nearly half the population is illiterate, there is constant fighting, extreme poverty and as many people with Aids as there are over-65s. But he knew then only that he was leaving behind his family. He was distraught.
Drogba's parents could not afford to fly with him from Abidjan, Ivory Coast's capital, to Paris Charles de Gaulle. 'I can remember it very clearly,' Drogba says, thinking back to that sad, sunny day as he looks outside at the rain soaking the pitches at Chelsea's training centre in Surrey. 'I had to travel alone, I was only five. I remember having this thing hanging around my neck, a label saying what my name was, and the stewardess looking after me. It was very, very difficult.'

He looks and sounds so intense that there is no doubting the strength of his emotions. He can still feel it nearly 24 years later. 'When I arrived in France, I cried every day. Not because I was in France - I could have been anywhere - but because I was so far, far away from my parents. I missed them so much.'

It was three long years before he saw them again. He returned, homesick, to live in Abidjan, playing football every day in a car park. Three years on, he was on the move again, aged 11. Both his parents were bank workers and both lost their jobs in an economic crash.

Since then Drogba has moved around France and ended up in England, where his performances as a goalscorer and all-round hero for Chelsea this season make him one of the favourites to be named Footballer of the Year. If he wins the award he would be the first non-European recipient of a title first won by Stanley Matthews, in 1948.

That would cap a remarkable five years in which Drogba became France's Footballer of the Year; scored the goals that took Olympique de Marseille, the team of his boyhood dreams, to the Uefa Cup final in 2004; signed for Chelsea for £24m that July and, a year later, helped them to their first title since 1955; and, perhaps best of all, for him, his goals gave his troubled country the chance to fly their flag at the World Cup finals for the first time.

The youth of Ivory Coast love Drogba. Every time he returns to Abidjan airport now, he is swamped by media and fans, top of the television news, feted wherever he goes. Drogbacite - or Drogbaness, in English - is a cultural phenomenon in music and dance that shows no signs of disappearing, even though the Elephants, the national team, did not get past the first round in Germany 2006. 'Drogbacite? It's all about me, about my success of the last four years [since his international debut],' he says. 'There is a special relationship between football and music, and Drogbacite comes from that. It's still popular. Me, I need my music, especially before a game. I use it at Chelsea to prepare in the dressing room.'

You can listen to the Drogbacite club hits on a compilation CD and to Drogba himself at the microphone on another disc. Before the World Cup, the Ivory Coast squad made a recording with Magic System, a local band, and both Drogba and the Arsenal defender Emmanuel Eboue showed that they can sing as well as play football. 'Yes, it's true I can sing,' says Drogba. 'But it's not what I do best.'

He does it well enough, though, and had the confidence to give a solo performance to the Ivory Coast President, Laurent Gbagbo, at a pre‑World Cup reception in Abidjan.

There is no exaggerating Drogba's fame in Ivory Coast. A few indicators: the popular one-litre bottle of Bock beer is big and strong, so is now known as a Drogba; a street in Abidjan has been renamed Rue Didier Drogba; an interview with Drogba in the local Stades d'Afriques newspaper led to a circulation increase of 87 per cent; and the most popular overseas club in Ivory Coast, which for years was Marseille, is now Chelsea - by a long way.

'Ask them in the Chelsea store,' says Drogba, 'and they'll tell you I am the one who buys all the shirts! When I go to Ivory Coast I always have to take so many, for my family and friends.'

Adam Khalil, who did that sales-busting interview with Drogba for Stades d'Afriques , says: 'He is a key personality in the life of Ivorians, young Ivorians above all. He is a symbol of success in life, the first Ivorian pro footballer who has been talked of like this. There is so much publicity around him and his performances that influences the life of young people. There are songs in which they sing his name. The way he dresses - the young copy it. The cut‑off T-shirts, the gelled hair. He is an example of social success. He came from nowhere and, with determination, succeeded.'

Just about every young Ivorian wants to be Didier Drogba, and if that is too much to ask, at least he wants to dance like Didier Drogba, who celebrated every goal he scored for Marseille four seasons ago with a dance. So Drogbacite is their way of taking on his personality, most expressively by copying his football skills, his feints and shots, in dance moves.

Oh yes, say the thousands of fans who cannot stand Drogba, the fans who make up songs about the 'conniving diver' who plays for the despised Chelsea. So, there must be thousands of young clubbers throwing themselves to the ground, falling over every time another dancer comes near, and writhing around on the dancefloor.

What do you say to those fans, Didier?

'I say they are not fair. In France there was a saying, I don't know if it's the same here, "Before looking at the others, look in your own team". I'm not especially a diver. Why accuse me?'

Last March Bryan Robson, then manager of West Bromwich Albion, was accuser-in-chief, saying: 'Drogba just dives all the time. He dives and feigns injury.' In the same month, after Chelsea's 2-0 win over Manchester City, Drogba told the BBC: 'Sometimes I dive, sometimes I stand.' He then withdrew the statement, blaming his poor English, and said: 'No, I don't dive.'

Earlier this season he spoke of how 'defenders enjoy kicking me, but I have moved on and I try to accept the assault now without falling down. I wasn't used to the English style at first and I didn't use my arms to protect myself. I played exactly as I had in France. Part of the problem is that challenges that are penalised in France are OK here.'

Now he tries to explain further. First, he emphasises that the differences between English and French football also apply when Chelsea play in Europe. 'In the Champions League the referees, even the English referees, have to whistle differently than they do in England. Some contact you cannot do in the Champions League. You need to adapt to this.

'And people here say, "He's diving, he's diving, he's diving", but when you're running with the ball and someone's coming at you like he wants to ...' - Drogba smacks his right fist into his left palm, loudly - 'to hit you or something, well, you are scared, you are a human being.' He pauses.

'I don't know how to explain it, that's part of the problem.'

Are you saying that you must take evasive action to avoid injury?

'It depends. It depends on the way he's coming at you. Of course, people think, "He's big, he's strong, he shouldn't fall over". People think footballers are all like robots, we can control everything on the pitch. But your heart is beating 200 times a minute, it's very, very physical.

'You need to have a football career to understand what we are feeling in a game, why we are doing this, doing that. You need to be a player to understand. I tell you, people making judgments, sitting at home on the sofa, they are in another world.'

Since that first flight, as he followed his uncle the journeyman pro and then his own career, Drogba has lived in Brest, Angouleme, Dunkirk, Abidjan, Dunkirk again, Abbeville, Tourcoing, Vannes, Poitiers, the Paris suburbs, Le Mans and Guingamp. In 1991, he was reunited with his family when his parents and six older brothers and sisters all moved from Abidjan to France. In 1999, there was a military coup in Ivory Coast as well as a big change in Drogba's life. He and his wife, Alla, a Malian whom he met in Paris, started their own family. 'Isaac's birth was a turning point in my life, it straightened me out,' he has said of his eldest son. Drogba now has three children and does not want them to move as often as he did.

Surprisingly, given his French connections, he is keen to stay in England when his playing days are finished. He wants to settle and he can think of nowhere better. 'When I like a place, I don't want to move. My children enjoy it, it's good for them to live here. Maybe I'll stay.' He has a specific task, too. Isaac wears an Arsenal shirt because Thierry Henry is his favourite player. Drogba has promised to become the new goalscoring superstar not just of the Premiership, but of his own family.

Asked for his best non-football memory from his time in England, he thinks hard about it, taking a long look at the ceiling. 'Waking up every day and seeing my kids speak English,' he says. 'They speak it better than me.'

Which must be very well indeed. Drogba has been taking lessons 'to develop my vocabulary' and it has helped to remove 'a wall between me and my mates' that was there when he arrived. He enjoys saying the word 'mates', which brings a little smile to his lips. 'The English you learn at school is completely different.'

He has felt settled before, however, and knows that 'in football, anything can happen'. Before coming to Chelsea, Drogba thought he would see out his playing days at Marseille.

'Oh, how I loved it there,' he says. 'I remember watching on television when Basile Boli, who was from Ivory Coast but played for the French national team, scored the winner when they won the Champions League in 1993. I already followed them and now I really fell in love with that club. When I signed for them everything was perfect for me. The weather, the city ... perfect. I thought I would spend the rest of my days there.' Drogba scored 18 in 35 games in his one-season stay, including the goals that knocked out Liverpool and Newcastle as Marseille made it to the Uefa Cup final. But neither he nor his club could say no to Chelsea's offer of pounds 24m in the summer of 2004.

The first club to pay a fee for Drogba did so because of an injury to Stephane Guivarc'h, the forward who played for France in the 1998 World Cup final. Guingamp, a small-town Breton team who were in the first division, took a gamble on a player who was spending a lot of time on the substitutes' bench at Le Mans, a division below. They paid pounds 80,000 for him in January 2002.

The man who saw something that others missed was Guy Lacombe, the Guingamp coach. Did Drogba himself see that potential?

'All I can say is I felt better, played better, against good teams. I found it difficult to express myself in the second division, there was a lot of physical contact. Whenever I played against a first-division team I felt better. The game was more thoughtful, more positional. It's strange, I know, but I preferred to play the stronger teams.'

Is it the same now?

'Yes. The Champions League, those are the games I love. You have to think. You make one mistake and, not always but usually, there is a consequence: a goal. Both teams are so experienced, the games are very close. You need a bit of luck. I learned a lot about how to play in these games in my first year at Chelsea. That was not my best season, but it was my most intelligent season.'

For all his success, Drogba has also had enough bad luck for one career. He was a junior at Levallois, his first club, and took his chance aged 18 when he came on for the last 10 minutes of a second-division game. He scored but his coach was unimpressed. Drogba then broke a foot when he tripped over a sprinkler, and later broke a metatarsal, a fibula and an ankle. His career kept stalling and he was 21 before he signed his first professional contract, at Le Mans.

At Guingamp he scored on his debut and helped his club to stay up. The following July, Drogba made an explosive start to the new season with an injury-time equaliser against Lyon. He scored 17 goals in 34 games and Marseille paid pounds 3.3m for him. In the same year, 2003, Drogba made his debut for the Elephants against South Africa. He had, as uncle Michel had predicted all those years ago, made something of his life, while back home in Ivory Coast the country was in turmoil, trying to recover from another failed coup. There was more to come: not just the move to Chelsea, but the goals that helped Ivory Coast to eliminate Cameroon in winning their World Cup qualifying group.

On hearing that Ivory Coast had made it after their victory in Sudan and Cameroon's surprise home draw with Egypt, Drogba dropped down on one knee in the dressing room, persuaded the other players to join him, and begged Ivorians to forgive one another and work for peace. 'There is more to Africa than war and fighting,' he says. 'Players like Essien, Diouf, Kanu, Eto'o in Spain, and me - we have a big responsibility because everybody in Africa believes in football.'

Will there be a Didier Drogba: My Life

'Yeah, I've thought about a book,' he says. 'I have a lot of things to say. From Ivory Coast to England I've had a lot of experiences - why not? But I'm not sure I would do it now. Maybe later, when I've finished playing.'

And the post-playing career? 'I've been thinking about that. I don't want to wait until I'm 34 before I start wondering about my future. If I decide I want to be a coach my wife wouldn't like it, but it's an idea I like.'

What of the current coach? Late last season, Drogba was thinking of leaving Chelsea, believing that some of the fans had turned against him. Jose Mourinho persuaded him to stay. 'I have a very good relationship with him. I know he believes in me and that's important. You need your manager to believe in you when you are not scoring, when you are having a difficult time. Now I will stay here. There's no point leaving.

'I was quoted recently as saying I was playing the best in my life, but that's not what I said. I said I was in my best form for Chelsea. I can do more. There is better to come.'

Has Drogba learned more from Mourinho than any other coach? 'Coaches can teach you two things: confidence, and technique. With other managers I learned more about technique, about self-control in front of goal, particularly from Guy Lacombe at Guingamp. From Jose I have learned how to win, how to reject defeat.'

The man who signed Drogba for Marseille, Alain Perrin - later Portsmouth manager - was sacked soon after Drogba's arrival; and the man who gave him his first contract, Marc Westerloppe, was also dismissed at Le Mans. What if Mourinho makes it a treble? 'Anything can happen,' says Drogba, who has made public his concerns about the dispute between Mourinho and Chelsea's owner, Roman Abramovich. 'There are some tensions at the club and when the bosses and manager are not rowing in the same direction, there are bound to be repercussions,' he said at his inauguration as a United Nations goodwill ambassador in Switzerland 10 days ago. 'Those arguments are having a negative effect on team performances.'

He believes the manager will stay, though. 'Everybody is saying that Chelsea are doing badly because we are not top, as we were last year, but nobody is talking about how well Manchester United are playing. They are very, very good.'

Drogba is among those who have spoken in support of Mourinho and, like John Terry and Frank Lampard, he wants Abramovich, to know how supportive the team are of the manager. But, he says, nothing will break their team spirit. 'It was strong before, now it is stronger. We are like a family.' And he includes the out-of-form Andriy Shevchenko in that statement. 'Everyone at Chelsea wants Sheva to succeed and I'm sure he will,' he says, pointing out that all foreign players take time to settle in England because of the cultural differences. That, he says, is what has happened to Shevchenko.

Drogba is very much a team man, as reflected by his answer to the question, what is your single best memory of your time in English football?

He shifts in his chair, in his designer jeans and white shirt, while doing a mental Google of all those goals he has scored, all those victories. The first title for Chelsea in 50 years, maybe? No. 'The Barcelona game at home.' The 1-0 this season or the 4-2 in 2005? 'The 4-2. I wasn't on the pitch, but that was it.'

Drogba was suspended and watched from the stands, yet this is his number-one moment.

'We are happy to have a professional like him,' says Mourinho. 'It is important to have players who fight for the team, who work, who attack and defend. He is the kind of player I would tell, "With you I could go to every war".'

The coach who 'spotted' Drogba for Le Mans in 1999, Alain Pascalou, says the Ivorian was a tough character even as a teenager. 'If any of the older guys gave him a hard time in the dressing room he'd stand up to them, answer them back. I had to get him out of a few sticky situations - at one point the club were going to sack him, but I convinced them to give him another chance.

'The thing with Didier is he's intelligent. The penny dropped, he realised what he needed to do to make it to the top. He has great willpower. He still comes back to see us and tells the kids here how he was lucky to have patient people around him and says how you have to work at it when you're young if you want to succeed.

'Didier wants to be a leader, wants to be loved. He needs to be lifted by the crowd, to feel the love. That's why he did so well at Marseille, with 60,000 fans screaming their passion at him, and why he took time to give his best at Chelsea. I don't think he felt that love from the crowd at the beginning. He's a showman, elegant, has charisma, class. And he cannot stand mediocrity.'

There are many reasons behind Didier Drogba's improved form. The main one, he says, is simply: 'I feel good.' He thumps his heart. 'Really good.' New signings and new tactics have played their part in making him feel that way. 'There is a big difference for me between 4-3-3 [last season] and 4-4-2 [this]. There is more room for me to express myself this season. And those African boys, they have helped.'

He is talking about Michael Essien, who has been a huge success; John Mikel Obi, whom Drogba tips to be 'the next great African midfield player, and that means one of the very best in the world'; Geremi, a versatile and important squad player; and Salomon Kalou, a fellow Ivorian who has yet to find his best form at Stamford Bridge.

'We have always had a good team spirit at Chelsea, very strong,' he says. 'For me, now it is even better.' Drogba socialises with the 'African boys' and enjoys a night out at an African club in London once a month with his own team-mates and others, among them Eboue, Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Adebayor, of Arsenal.

Back in 1992, the last time Ivory Coast won the African Cup of Nations ('I remember that well, watching on television, our goalkeeper Alain Gouamene was the hero,' says Drogba) English football provided one player for the biennial tournament, the Swansea and Nigeria defender Reuben Agboola. Now there seem to be as many Africans in the top division of English football as there were Scots back then.

Almost every club will lose top players next January and February, when the next tournament is held in Ghana. If their teams qualify, Kolo Toure, Eboue, Adebayor and Song will be missing at Arsenal; Diouf, Meite and Faye at Bolton; Kanu, Mwaruwari and LuaLua at Portsmouth; Zokora and Mido at Tottenham; Sissoko at Liverpool; Martins at Newcastle, McCarthy at Blackburn, the list goes on. But none at Manchester United - and no team will lose more quality than Chelsea. Imagine taking Drogba and Essien out of their team now, while United stay as they are. What would that do to team spirit?

Non-News: No Led Zeppelin reunion

Ok - for over a week now people have been asking whether the rumours of a Led Zeppelin reunion are true. Let me say first that nothing would make me happier than to tell you that Page, Plant and Jones were reuniting with Jason Bonham on drums.
Here's the thing - it isn't true. I don't guarantee it, but I almost do. Plant has gone on the record saying he wouldn't tour with Jason as his dad's replacement. Plant also has dates coming up with his band the Strange Sensation, and has been working in Nashville on material. Page says he's working on a solo album for sometime this year.

The article in question that got these rumours started came from a British tabloid magazine. It got the band members ages wrong, along with the date of when they last played together. My theory is that this article was written back in 2002, not long before the release of the Led Zeppelin DVD and How The West Was Won cd set.

There's also a website out there saying that John Paul Jones told the Mighty Q that the band was working on something - none of us have spoken to John Paul Jones recently. If we had, we'd all probably be asking for bass lessons. So to the jerkass out there spreading rumours about the Mighty Q and leading on Zep fans around the world - your time is gonna come.

See what I did there :)

So once more - no Zeppelin reunion to speak of. Don't let anybody tell you different.