Back in the Sixties it was floppy plum-coloured velvet jobs to go

Back in the Sixties, it was floppy, plum-coloured velvet jobs to go with his white suit. “Now the mere act of wearing a hat causes more outrage than wandering through St James’s Park naked.”Along with music, clothes and style are one of Cohn’s enduring fascinations, though I am disappointed to find that he is not responsible for putting Travolta into a white suit for Fever “I stopped wearing them when Tom Wolfe started wearing them. There was enough guff about me being the English Wolfe and the suits would have made it seem like I was a wannabe, whereas I hated him,” he laughs.Cohn was brought up in Derry, where his father, the celebrated historian Norman Cohn, was a university professor. But academia held no interest for a young man who had fallen in love with rock’n'roll.

“And what do you do when you’re completely unskilled and averse to work?” asks Cohn. “You become a writer.”Cohn still lives contentedly in New York, an American citizen with an American wife – “I like the intensity of New York. In Muswell Hill it was still the 1950s.”Cohn quit Britain for New York in 1975, though he remains a regular visitor Today he is in senior statesman mode. Ensconced in a discreet but plush West End hotel, up at the dark-blue end of the Monopoly board, he is burly, bearded and dapper, draped in a lovat suit topped off by correspondent shoes at one end and a large fedora at the other He has always worn hats, he tells me.

The same quality informed his journalism for the Observer and the Sunday Times, which chronicled the pop decade in all its peacock glory, though as Cohn points out “Swinging London was tiny – 500 people and three nightclubs. Fever concentrated on tiny stardom, the idea that you could satisfy that hunger on your own turf.”Cohn was 30 when he penned Another Saturday Night, but already a writer of repute. In the Sixties he had become a cause celebre, thanks to the novels he had written as a teenager – Market and I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo – and Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, his 1969 rock history which even now remains one of the definitive pop texts.Tart and informed, his writing captured the mythology and texture of music and youth culture in snappy, waspish prose. What was different was that previously people always became rock stars to escape. I was finishing a novel at the time, King Death, which I was convinced was the important thing, whereas it was the worst thing I ever wrote.

It confirms what I have always suspected, that we have no idea what we’re doing at the time, in life, in love or anything else.”What remains doubly odd about Fever is that although Cohn set his tale in Brooklyn, it was based entirely on his experiences of London mods back in the mid-Sixties. He simply grafted their weekend rituals – the narcissism, the dancing, the rivalry – onto Italian New York. Even the mod argot stayed intact, after all, no-one in Brooklyn ever talked abut “being a Face”, but native New Yorkers would still ask Cohn how many years of research it had taken to capture their experiences so acutely.”I touched on an archetype,” says Cohn. “Disaffected youth is disaffected youth – that lad standing there in Nowheresville thinking there has to be more to it than this Fever is about that hunger.

The keening harmonies of the Brothers Gibb, a million naff dance routines by medallion men under the illusion that they were John Travolta in a white suit, tens of millions of records sold and cinema seats filled – it was all down to Cohn and Another Saturday Night, the short story he dashed off back in the mid-Seventies on which Saturday Night Fever was based.
Just as the Bee Gees and Travolta were to find that film a mixed blessing – the singers have never shaken it off and Travolta only laid to rest the ghost of the protagonist Tony Manero after Pulp Fiction – so Cohn finds himself invariably described as the man who wrote it, though he didn’t write the screenplay (“I had a go, but my script was the alpha and omega of turkeys”) and considers his other books and his journalism more important.”Fever has always been odd for me because it wasn’t a big deal in my writing life,” he says “It was a small story. Because when I told him about it his face lit up; he smiled; he turned into a proper person We were having a proper conversation. Then the publicity person did the wind-up sign and my 300 seconds were up.Rosie Millard is the BBC’s arts correspondent.. AT THE party to celebrate the premiere of Saturday Night Fever, The Musical, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees offered a special word of praise for Nik Cohn “It’s all your bloody fault, isn’t it?”

Indeed, it is. Even if the questions are interesting, how can a person answer them thoughtfully with 20 interviews a day? It’s not until you say something surprising that the celeb even looks at you properly.And so I offered up thanks to the God of Celebrity that a) I had seen Saturday Night Fever on stage in London and that b) Travolta had not. You’ll like him.” And with that he vanished behind a clump of jasmine.An exclusive interview? Don’t make me laugh We were parked in a hut alongside 20 others It was boiling hot After two hours, my moment arrived.