OK, so rock critics are meant to be the epitome of cool, but all writers have embarrassing moments, don’t they? What have been the most cringable moments in your career? This can be the blush blog, a place to divulge those moments you’d rather forget.
I’ve had a few. When I started writing for the NME, I had just turned 17 and was at school – an all girls’ grammar, so I hadn’t talked to many blokes in my life yet, apart from relatives. Boys were these distant figures I saw on the bus to school when I purposefully dawdled at the bus stop so I could catch glimpses of the Christ College Finchley blokes on the top deck.
For over a year, I stuck with Live reviews, gigs and films . Then, my kindly features ed suggested I do an interview. He asked which band I fancied interviewing. I was going through a Postcard Records phase at the time, so I decided on Aztec Camera. The interview was duly set up and I arrived and asked them all sorts of questions.
The trouble was, I had never been north of Barnet. I couldn’t understand a word of what they said. Roddy Frame and the rest of the band’s soft Glasgow burr was mesmerizing but incomprehensible. I nodded fervently a lot, then went home and wrote an ‘interview’ with no questions or answers. It was like a live review with no gig, an album review without an album.
Tony Stewart – for he was the gentle soul in the Features desk – was lovely about it. He even paid me a kill fee, which I really didn’t deserve.
But things were to get worse. On the way back from the NME office in Carnaby Street a few weeks later, I bumped into a guy I recognised who greeted me warmly. Since I knew no guys at that time apart from my dad and brother, I assumed he was a fellow hack from the NME office. Only, I couldn’t really catch what he was saying – funny accent. So to cover up, I spoke and smiled a lot. ‘Have you just been in the NME office too?’ I asked him. I babbled on about having been at the office and asked him what features he was writing at the moment. He looked a little confused. Then I realized that in my haste, I had followed him onto a Central line tube going in the opposite direction to the one I wanted, so I interrupted his bewildered answer with a hurried ‘oops, wrong train, must dash’ and jumped off at the next station.
It was only then that I realized this had been one of the long-suffering band members rather than a fellow hack. And that as well as being too incompetent to do an interview, I’d also gabbled at him alarmingly, asked him inappropriate questions about what features he was writing, and shown him my mastery of the tube system was as poor as my comprehension of the Scottish accent.
Luckily, I did eventually manage to do an interview that was published, with Matt Johnson of The The. This interview took place in my first week at university. I had had wonderful bustling London and a dream job reviewing gigs, albums and films taken away and substituted with hordes of screaming freshers discovering alcohol and going to toga parties with wacky wigs on. It was hell. I borrowed a tape recorder from a girl in my residence but found out after several hours with Matt Johnson that it hadn’t taped a word. Luckily, Matt was kind enough to do the interview again.
I had another knuckle chewing experience about a year ago, this time, thankfully, due to a chain of editorial cock-ups rather than any fault of my own . I had carried out a series of interviews with people connected with the world of medicine for the British Medical Journal. One of my interviewees was Sir John Lilleyman, a paediatric haematologist who was at that time Director of the National Patient Safety Agency. Many years before, he had been President of the Royal College of Pathologists, but that was half a decade in the past.
The week before the interview was published, the journal boasted ‘interview with President of the Royal College of Pharmacologists.’
‘That can’t be my one’, I thought, ‘wrong college’. Sir John wasn’t a pharmacologist but a pathologist. Apart from both beginning with ps, they don’t have much in common. It would be like confusing the Sex Pistols with Sugababes.
The following week, when the issue came out, I noticed that on the cover it proclaimed ‘Interview with the President of the Royal College of Pathologists.’
‘Eh?’ I thought. ‘They must have swapped my interview with one with the current President of the Royal College of Pathologists.’
I turned to the interview page. They hadn’t swapped interviews, it was my one. But here, the editorial blerb was even more inaccurate – it claimed Sir John was President of the Royal College of Surgeons. He’d never even been a surgeon. This couldn’t get any worse.
Actually, it could. Instead of introducing him as Sir John Lilleyman, the editor had labelled him Sir John Willeyman.
Luckily for me, Sir John had a good sense of humour. ‘Probably a Freudian slip’, he replied twinklingly when I e mailed him to grovel.
