that he had imagined that if he could publish a book then he would be able to make a living as a professional writer, but the £700 he made from that novel was not enough to allow him to leave Gordon's Gin factory. However, when the weekly music magazine New Musical Express (NME) advertised for new writers in the summer of 1976, Parsons submitted his novel to the editor, Nick Logan, and was rewarded with a staff writer job. For the next three years he wrote about new music. He wrote the first cover story on the Clash and features on the Sex Pistols, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, the New York Dolls, Buzzcocks, and Led Zeppelin among others. For most of the 1980s, Parsons struggled to make a living as a freelance writer. His career started to recover in 1990 when he wrote Bare, an authorised biography of pop star George Michael. Despite the absence of a written contract with the singer, proceeds from the book were split equally between the two men. However, they fell out in 1999 after an interview Michael had given to Parsons was published in the Daily Mirror. In the 1990s, Parsons became a regular on the live BBC panel show Late Review. He also made a series of authored documentaries for Channel 4. When Piers Morgan became editor of the Daily Mirror, Parsons was poached from The Daily Telegraph as a columnist. In 1993, he presented a film for the British television documentary series Without Walls, focusing on the controversy surrounding the film A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick and distributor Warner Brothers sued broadcaster Channel 4, unsuccessfully, in an attempt to prevent clips from the film being shown on television. In the programme Parsons is seen taking a cross-channel ferry from England to France to watch the film, which at the time was embargoed in Britain due to a self-imposed ban by the director. Though it sold respectably on publication, the novel Man and Boy (1999) was a word-of-mouth success, and only reached number one in The Sunday Times bestseller list one year after publication. Man and Boy won the British Book Awards' Book of the Year Prize in 2001. It has been published in 39 languages, including Chinese for its publication in the People's Republic of China in January 2009. In 2007, Parsons wrote a series