The GONZO GUYS

Just over 50 years ago, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo masterpiece, was serialised in two parts in Rolling Stone magazine before being published as a book in 1972. Ralph Steadman’s instantly iconic illustrations of Thompson’s drug-crazed bestiary, where the characters are more animal than human, take their cue from the book’s epigraph from Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Half a century later, the opening paragraph has lost none of its wild, hallucinatory comedy: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car,

which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”

Lightheaded and high is exactly how the reader feels all the way through this still intense and hilarious book, though for