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 about 1991 or so. 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. 

But there is 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

music press adverts

I am obsessed with the advertisements in the old music papers - the New Wave era is particularly rich for the semiotician and lover of graphic design trends, but then so is the Old Wave era.  For a historian, it's almost as rich material to draw on as the actual journalism.

However that is not my subject today - my subject today is advertisements for the music press. 

I'm going to start looking for the ink-and-paper versions, which I suspect are clueless in the extreme.

 But for now here are TV commercials for weekly music papers, going from the early '80s to the 2000s.

These were posted by someone at ILM. 

I wonder to what extent they were actually showed on TV. Perhaps some were used as cinema ads.

I  remember a radio advert for Melody Maker during my early years of being there that was a really irritating jingle and the chorus went something "Read music, read Melody Maker" in a sing-song sort of matey voice. Or was it "love music, read Melody Maker"? Can't recall but the jingle is lodged in my brain like an indestructible tapeworm.

There was also a T-shirt floating around that said something like "Melody Maker - Tomorrow's Music Today". 

In the actual music papers, you would get adverts for other music magazines sometimes - The Face advertised in NME regularly. 

Monitor actually bought some micro-ads to run in the NME and also The Face, I think. We had come into some funding. 

I can feel this post already extending itself towards future posts, including 1/ music journalists on television and 2/ fictionalized depictions of the rock press on television and in film. 

There's quite a lot of the former - as a taster, I give you this ruddy marvellous clip of the Stud Brothers being callously anti-humanist in 1989

Andy does the singles!

 RIP Mr Kershaw... I didn't much care for his taste (and the underlying ideology) -  as least as evidenced by his influential radio show - but here he reveals a solid talent for record reviewing. 

Billy does the singles!

Sadly I don't have the whole Mackenzie singles page, nor do I recall where it came from (the year must be around 1987). 

Still, William is quite as flamboyantly caustic as his erstwhile chum Morrissey in decreeing these efforts to be really nothing. 

Here in fact is Morrissey being harsher still on a David Sylvian single

In my class on The Artist As Critic / The Critic as Artist last week, assigned readings included Morrissey's singles columns of the 1980s - and I thought it would be fun to play some of the singles (with their appalling videos) in class and get the students to review them, before I read out the Mozzer verdict.  Among them were Sylvian's "Pulling Punches"

And it was fun - they were a particularly bad batch of records, including Carmel's "Bad Day" and a twilight-phase Hazel O'Connor.

Although germane and acerbic points were made, none quite matched Stephen's barbs. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I don't have many regrets - at least about the music journalism years - but one of them is never having got to interview Billy Mackenzie. 

There was always a queue to interview him at Melody Maker and higher-ups would pull rank to secure their 5th or 6th sit-down with him. 

 

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Muriel could recite the phone book and I'd be enchanted.