The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

Anyone who every dreams of being in the music business thinks that 'being with the band' is an instant passport to free drugs, women and hedonistic, rock 'n' roll good times. But Stuart Maconie hilariously tells a different story of the slow-drip hell of continental travel in the claustrophobic confines a small van with a certain death metal trio.

This digital bite has been extracted from Stuart Maconie's brilliant book Cider with Roadies.