rock writers on the teevee

Not interested here in rock writers in their current haggard state, of which there are innumerable examples on YouTube.... but rather, rock writers in their original pristine prime. These are much rarer, as rock journalism was not taken seriously by the gatekeepers of the mass media. 

In roughly chronological order   

There are some TV clips of the young Coon here amongst the looking-back stuff.

She also appears here from 14.35 onwards in this next clip, a TV program about The Alternative Society

Richard Williams (Melody Maker) presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test, with a natty mustache

Clip of Legs McNeil and the other fellow from Punk magazine which you'll have to go to YouTube to watch

Danny Baker, pre-NME, and Mark Perry, both then repping for Sniffin' Glue

Apparently the Clash totally fan-boyed Tony P

Charles Shaar Murray

The earliest clip of me on the box is from The Late Show  -  a live-on-air discussion of Jimi Hendrix. This must be 1990. I was brought on to represent the younger breed alongside more venerable rock pundits like Richard Williams and Charles Shaar Murray (during the long wait, CSM took me in the stairwell for a smoke and tried to ascertain how cool I was about weed. I certainly was not going to get stoned immediately before going on national TV). 

I have to say, I looked quite dreamy. Extremely soft-spoken, almost whispering through a cloud of long curly hair, as I unfurled my Dionysian argument: better by far that Hendrix shot across the sky like a meteor than for him to have carried on, gradually dwindling to an ember of his former incandescent intensity.  Only the most bourgeois metric would measure a life in terms of mere duration. In his brief transit, shooting star Jimi burned through lifetimes more "experience" than we mere mortals eke out across our cautious, play-safe spans. 

Young man's talk, obviously... 

It used to be online but no more.... somewhere I have it still on a VHS tape. 

UPDATE: Actually you know what, being a hoarder, turns out I saved it from YouTube... 

there is also this.... from 1998, the electronica doc Modulations. 

I don't look quite as terrible as I remember... When it was premiered in a movie theater, my bad hair blown up on the big screen, I was aghast. 

Kodwo Eshun in the middle of the Reynolds sandwich there, looking very natty indeed. 

Another Kodwo bit

 I remember being peeved that they used him talking about gabber, and not me!  

The full film - I think we are the only journos in it

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I said I didn't want to show the legendary critics in their current haggard state, but chanced on this the other night and it's full of them in varying states of disrepair  (and this is quite an old look-back prog, must have been made in the 2000s I should think)

Charles Shaar Murray - Ohio Players (live in 1975) - NME - December 24 1983

This review made an impression when I read it in the Christmas 1983 issue of NME. The concept of this page "The Ghost of Live Past" is reviews not of concerts from the preceding week but from years ago - writers revisiting  gigs that had a profound impact on them. 

In this case, NME legend Charles Shaar Murray remembers a 1975 concert by Ohio Players he saw in Detroit. The first part of it is simply a well-observed live review (I should imagine that unless he has phenomenal powers of recall, CSM had been there to do a feature on the band and consequently had some old notes that he could draw on). 

Where it gets interesting is when he gets into meta-talk about how black music works for its audience - an Ohio Players performance as the performing of a community service, the sound and the stage show  communicating with the band's primary fans on a vibrational level that necessarily bypasses even the most informed and sensitive white listener.  

Earlier in the 1970s, CSM did a round-up review of a bunch of soul and R&B records, criticizing some (Isaac Hayes for instance) in a fairly standard for the time white rock critic way: too slick, too over-produced / too over-arranged, too close to showbiz.  As a fan of blues (later to write books about John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix), he would have had that preference for the gritty, the raw, the raspy - and an antipathy for the mellifluous and the polished. Here, though, just a few years later,  he grasps the power of slickness and tightness, the sheer commitment to entertainment manifested by Ohio Players. 

There's a phrase in this review - "their murderous and militant elegance" - that I assimilated so deeply I must have come to believe I'd thought it up all by myself, reusing it sometimes almost word for word and other times in adapted form (e.g. "lethal panache") many times over the years.

A few years later, I would have a similar revelatory experience to Charlie Murray's when I went to review Zapp for Melody Maker. A show so militantly - no, militarily - tight and professional I went to see the band perform it again at the same venue the very next night.