Born: born 27th April 1951
Died: 16th October 2025
In May 1983, the guitarist Ace Frehley was driving his DeLorean sports car along the Bronx River Parkway in New York when he was asked to pull over by a police officer. In an intoxicated state, Frehley “sped off”, as the charge sheet later phrased it, reaching 90mph and colliding with four other cars. He was caught, arrested and charged with drunk and reckless driving.
“My licence was revoked, I had to pay a large fine and I received a bunch of negative publicity,” he recalled, adding: “The other consequence was a court-ordered two-week stint in a hospital detox unit, and some mandatory AA meetings.”
Frehley, who has died aged 74, led a life punctuated by similar incidents, whether self-inflicted or inadvertent, such as a life-threatening electrocution that he narrowly survived on stage in 1976 with Kiss, the US rock band with whom he is most closely associated.
In December that year the group – then Frehle
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