Ramble, rant or reminisce, this is an artist’s opportunity to pen their own Clash article.
1. Top interview tactic no.1 (what not to do):
In the mid 1980s I was at college harbouring desires to become an NME writer in the same way some people harbour desires to kidnap Melanie Sykes and keep her in their shed dressed as Lenin. My big chance came when the college fanzine dispatched me to interview Scottish pop group The Bluebells, then the last word in jingly jangly retro Byrdsian indie cool.
I went to interview them backstage after their gig at the college, entered their dressing room and got out my tape recorder. After about twenty minutes or so into the interview, I decided to wrap up and said “So, things seem to be going pretty well for The Bluebells right now. I guess it vindicates that notion that classic pop never really dates?” I will never forget their answer. “We’re not the Bluebells.” I had interviewed the support band. That, as far as I was concerned, was the beginning and the end of my career as a rock journalist.
2. Interview recording equipment:
Mistakes with The Bluebells notwithstanding, eventually I became a stringer for the NME and gradually my involvement with the paper and its editor, my mentor, James Brown evolved.
Following a memorably disastrous appearance on Top Of The Pops to the public at large, All About Eve were a bit of a joke. I think of them with great affection though. For All About Eve were (if you don’t count the group who turned out not be the Bluebells) the first group I ever interviewed – my first NME feature.
The day in question found me wandering down the Caledonian Road in North London carrying, I’m embarrassed to say, a huge Panasonic ghetto blaster.
I had no idea how journalists conducted interviews. Did they scribble shorthand down in notebooks with a pencil plucked from behind their ear, like in Ealing comedies? Or were there special little recording machines? ‘The Sony Journoman’? ‘The Panasonic Rockhacker’? I had no idea, so I had to take the train to London and turn up at the interview with a portable cassette player the size of a small suitcase.
3. Always listen to the artist:
Mark E Smith once told me I had a look of MC Hammer.
4. Always attend the band/gig you are reviewing:
I was sent by NME to review the Reading Festival in 1989. These days the Reading Festival is about as anarchic as Time Team with Tony Robinson. Then it was Dante’s Thames Valley Inferno. All day I sat and watchedwhilst revolting barefoot hippy children called Gandalf and Placenta set fire to paper cups until on the stroke of ten, Hells Angels descended on the site, urinated feverishly into plastic cider bottles and threw them at Bonnie Tyler. I could stand it no longer and went home without seeing headliners Jefferson Starship. But I did throw a clever reference into my NME review. I said the Jefferson Starship singer Grace Slick had seen the carnage and horror of Altamont and was not going to be phased by some greasers from Maidenhead. After my review appeared, a reader wrote to NME saying that they absolutely agreed but felt they had to point out that Grace Slick had left Jefferson Starship two and a half years earlier.
5. Always be ready for a track to change your life:
I SAID NEAT NEAT NEAT, SHE CAN’T AFFORD A CANNON, NEAT NEAT NEAT, SHE CAN’T AFFORD A GUN AT ALL,
NEAT NEAT NEAT! NO CRIME IF THERE AIN’T NO LAW, NO MORE COPS LEFT TO MESS YOU AROUND, NO MORE DREAMS OF MYSTERY CHORDS, NO MORE SIGHT TO BRING YOU DOWN
(The Damned – ‘Neat Neat Neat’)
6. Always be ready for another track to change your life:
“Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate”. It was some opening gambit. Six words, four of which I don’t think I’d ever heard in a pop song before; a hell of a strike rate. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the first time pop music spoke directly to me. It said something to me about my life. (The Smiths – ‘This Charming Man’)
7. Say what you believe:
I have a strong distaste for the whole music festival business. They are dirty, smelly,uncomfortable, wretched and fundamentally against nature’s law. I hate the wristbands and I hate the sleeping bags. Glastonbury is so bourgeois now that it has practically become part of the season to be done along with Ascot and Henley.
8. Have cider with roadies:
There are two types of roadies. 1. is a young bloke of 23 with a very short indigo Mohican, baggy combat shorts with seven hundred pockets and a Biohazard T-shirt. You will never have a conversation with this roadie as he lives high up in the lighting gantry and only descends to feed and procreate. 2. The other type of roadie is a tall, warty man of about 48 with a greying ponytail and tight black jeans. He has been a roadie since 1969 when he ‘rigged the backline’ for Led Zeppelin. It is a case of ‘Have Maglite, Will Travel’. Invariably you will end up drinking cider with this man very late one night and when you ask him about his previous employers, be it Bowie or Jagger, his answer will always be the same “He’s a really nice bloke actually.” This roadie could have worked Hitler’s Sudetenland tour and his verdict would have been, “Hard-line politics, yes. But he’s a really nice bloke actually.”
9. Keep an open mind:
Meeting the Happy Mondays 1988: Bez’s wild eyes rolled in his head, looking anywhere except the person he was talking to. He jabbered endlessly, meaninglessly, chiefly to Shaun, giggling to himself all the while dancing on the spot or moving from side to side like a goalkeeper awaiting a penalty.
I quickly decided Bez couldn’t possibly be in the band. Instead, I thought – I’m really not proud of this – that he must be another Ryder brother, sibling to Paul and Shaun, andobviously mentally handicapped in some way. They were letting him hang out with them and I thought this was admirable – but 1989 belonged to Manchester, to the Happy Mondays and the other mooching, tousled, zonked-out, freaky dancing crowd.
10. And finally:
Have a top laugh.
