Chris Dawes

I'm the author of a book called Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail. It's the story of how my good friend Rat Scabies, the former drummer of punk pioneers The Damned, dragged me around France and Scotland in search of the Holy Grail.

Along the way, we hung out with esoteric gurus, treasure hunters, remote visionaries, alien channellers, vortex sorcerers, reincarnated medieval heretics and modern-day Knights Templars. We spent a lot of time in the mysterious village of Rennes-le-Chateau in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and also visited Paris, Lyon ("the esoteric capital of France") and Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh. While we were in Scotland, we managed to blag our way into a Knights Templar initiation ceremony, which was one of the strangest things I've ever seen in my life.
Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail has been described as "The Da Vinci Code gets the punk rock treatment". It's had lots of positive reviews, which is nice, and is now in its second edition in the UK. It has also been published in the US and translated into German and Russian.
You can find out more about the book and read some reviews here:
http://www.geocities.com/ratscabiesholygrail

In a previous life, I was a music journo, writing for Melody Maker under the pen name Push before becoming the editor of first Muzik and then Mondo. My pushspace page is here:

http://www.myspace.com/pushspace

As well as Rat Scabies And The Holy Grail, I am also the author of:
The Book Of E - All About Ecstasy (credited to Push and co-written by Mireille Silcott), Pussy (a collaboration with Steven Appleton, Paul Thompson and Mark Wernham), and Bitch (another collaboration with Steven, Paul and Mark).