Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea announces memoir 'Acid For The Children'

Originally scheduled to hit the shelves last year, the 384-page autobiography will be released in the UK on Tuesday 5th November 2019 via Headline Publishing Group.

Featuring a foreword by Patti Smith, the book “takes readers on a deeply personal and revealing tour of Flea’s formative years, spanning from Australia to the New York City suburbs to, finally, Los Angeles.”

Flea began writing the book in April 2014 and he said of it last year: “It’s my great hope that it could be a book that could live beyond being a celebrity book or a rock star book and just stand on its own as a piece of literature. It ends where the Red Hot Chili Peppers begins.”

A plot synopsis for ‘Acid For The Children’ reads: “Through hilarious anecdotes, poetical meditations, and occasional flights of fantasy, Flea deftly chronicles the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician, and a young man. His dreamy, jazz-inflected prose makes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and 80s come to gritty, glorious life, including the potential for fun, danger, mayhem, or inspiration that lurked around every corner. It is here that young Flea, looking to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists, and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a higher meaning, a place to channel his frustration, loneliness, and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his best friends, soul brothers, and partners-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band, which became the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“Acid for the Children is the debut of a stunning new literary voice, whose prose is as witty, entertaining, and wildly unpredictable as the author himself. It's a tenderly evocative coming-of-age story and a raucous love letter to the power of music and creativity from one of the most renowned musicians of our time.”

Born Michael Peter Balzary in Melbourne on 16th October 1962, Flea co-founded the Red Hot Chili Peppers alongside singer Anthony Kiedis, guitarist Hillel Slovak and drummer Jack Irons in Los Angeles the early 1980s.

To date, the band have sold more than 80million records worldwide and have scooped six Grammy Awards. In 2012, the Chili Peppers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Alongside Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea has been a member of the supergroups Atoms for Peace, Antemasque, Pigface, and Rocket Juice & the Moon, and he’s collaborated with acts including The Mars Volta, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits.

He has also briefly performed as a member of Jane’s Addiction, What Is This? and Fear.

Flea’s Red Hot Chili Peppers band mate Anthony Kiedis released his acclaimed autobiography Scar Tissue in 2004.