Bash it out: that was the mantra of any productive NME journalist. Just get it done. There are fifty-one issues of the magazine to send a year. Many other people are willing to fill those issues with words if you are unable to supply them, so get on with it. Struggling with an ending? Tough. Need an extension to rework that intro? Sorry. Bash it out.
Later, when I worked on monthlies, I’d marvel at the section editors who’d take a ‘writing day’ at home to compose a 350-word album review. On staff at NME, I’d write a 1,500-word feature in a day and a 3,000-word cover story over the weekend. You soon became adept at writing quickly to tight deadlines.
The caveat to that machismo is that the writing was often rubbish. It could’ve always been improved by taking more care and space, with more inquisitive editing, but the clock was running. There was no time for any of that navel-gazing. There’s another issue to fill in seven days.
Who reads last week’s NME anyway?
Bands read last week’s NME, that’s who. And, unlike you, they never forget what you’ve written about them.
If I’d been paying closer attention to Thom Yorke in Madrid, it would have saved me a lot of pain later in Barcelona, Berlin and Birmingham. He’d let me know very clearly where he was going with all this.
It was May 1995. We were sitting in the basement of an Italian restaurant in the Spanish capital sharing bowls of pasta with the other members of Radiohead at the time, which was approaching midnight. I’d spent the afternoon in the lobby of their hotel watching them being ground into the dust by promotional duties. They weren’t even playing in the city. They were on an international promo tour, calling in at several hubs over a fortnight to satisfy the growing, constant interest in them. I joined a queue of journalists from Spain, France, Norway, Brazil and Holland to talk to each of them in turn as members of the Barcelona basketball team milled around us awaiting their coach, before interviewing Thom over drinks and dinner that evening.
I was there to write a cover story about Radiohead, which Steve Sutherland had somewhat grudgingly granted at the second time of asking, having already demoted one such commission from the cover at the last minute a few months earlier. Like many observers – me included – he’d had to swallow his initial assessment of them as one-hit wonders after the international smash ‘Creep’ from their so-so first album Pablo Honey was followed a couple of years later in 1995 by The Bends, an album which was not just a big step up in terms of writing and delivery, but also contained several hit singles. I was there to make amends for NME having pulled out of our initial Bends-related cover in February. They were a British guitar band with a platinum second album, an album that had quickly sold a million copies across the globe. They were huge in America. We couldn’t ignore them.
Even as we now praised Radiohead, though, we underestimated them. The Bends wasn’t their true manifestation, their destination. It was their first giant leap forwards. They would make several other preconception-smashing albums over the following decade or so, shapeshifting beyond any pigeonholes journalists such as I could dream up for them. We were blind to their true potential.
It was an easy mistake to make. Generally, music journalists on the weeklies in the eighties and nineties were prejudiced against geeky, awkward-looking public schoolboys from Oxfordshire playing histrionic indie rock. We thought that was what monthly magazine journalists on Q or Empire looked like, not rock stars. Radiohead’s songs were driven by angst, both existential and physical. What did they have to worry about? Their lives were gilded.
It wasn’t just how inky music writers viewed them, either. Many musicians ahead of them in the cultural pecking order then were snobbishly suspicious, too. When I interviewed Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream in 1997, he asked me what I was listening to. I told him I was addicted to the forthcoming Radiohead album, OK Computer. He’d wrinkled his nose.
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head as if I’d asked him a question rather than made a recommendation.
‘It’s going to really surprise you,’ I told him. ‘They’re going somewhere totally new with rock music here.’
‘No, I won’t listen to that shit,’ he told me, decisively. And that was that.
In the end, none of our prejudice affected the impact Radiohead made. The music they produced, the concerts they delivered so far surpassed any expectations critics had for them at each stage. They were an arena rock band playing to rooms full of lighters held aloft for a while around the first two records, but they soon became the best at that. Then they remerged as a more progressive rock band, but found a way to translate that windiness to stadiums, becoming the biggest group on the planet for a while for their third album. They turned their back on that, too, and metamorphosed into a partly electronic art-rock act, touring the world in their own huge tents. They grew rhythmic, experimental, political – yet they could still engage directly with a 100,000 fans at Glastonbury. Radiohead were on a distinct path, even if none of us could read their map. They didn’t need us. In the end, that critical resistance was irrelevant to them.
Well, nearly. It was all going somewhere, being buried for karmic revenge. The band were logging it.
In Madrid, I was afforded good time with each member. They were very generous, thoughtful. Talking with bassist Colin Greenwood it felt a little as if I was being interviewed by him, he was so interested in NME and its writers. He knew everyone’s tastes, all the weekly in-jokes from its pages. He wanted to know what Johnny Cigarettes was really called (Johnny Sharp), whether Steve Sutherland hated them (unlikely), if Steven Wells was as terrifying in real life as his furiously funny prose (no, he was a very noisy puppy). Colin was friendly, flamboyant with his adjectives, open.
His brother Jonny, the extravagantly gifted guitarist, gave a more instructive glimpse into Radiohead’s future relationship with the press.
‘I got really despairing in Canada about three weeks ago,’ he said, slumped in his seat opposite me, describing the North American leg of this promo tour. ‘I hadn’t seen an instrument for weeks but still had been talking about Radiohead every day …’
The first signs of the future dislocation were there. Later, Thom Yorke predicted exactly what was coming down the line over the next decade from Radiohead. Though I reported his quotes, I didn’t really see the bigger picture. How could I? At that moment they were just a big alternative rock band on their second album about to obtain a coveted first NME cover.
‘I get really envious when I hear stuff on Warp Records,’ he said, invoking the then Sheffield-based avant-garde electronic label which was home to Autechre and LFO. ‘I get the sense that they’re made in isolation and that there wasn’t this need to be a bollocks rock band going, “I want my guitar solo.” It’s not that there isn’t anything new to be done with the guitar, it’s just that I’m not hearing it from bands. I hear it with Jonny every day. There’s this sense of adventure working with computers that’s so exciting. I’d like to explore that more. Depends on the songs.’
The songs that they’d started sketching for album number three wouldn’t really fit with this electronic direction that he was advocating, but it would be fully reflected by the albums they delivered in the noughties. He was five years ahead of his time.
I just thought he was riffing for the interview, though. I didn’t realise he was laying out his entire blueprint for the future of his band. In the midst of his long promotional tour to satisfy a growing international audience, he was already thinking of ways to survive the onward journey. Radiohead had actively sought international success with a lust that most British bands (other than Oasis) had not, but having tasted it they alone wished to change the rules of engagement for the sake of their own longevity.
‘What we’re most conscious of is a need to stop being a tumble dryer spewing stuff out,’ outlined Thom over dinner. ‘There’ll be a point when we say enough, otherwise we could be selling margarine, anything. We’ve got to engineer enough room not to be kissing ugly arse any more. I think all the work we’re doing now will allow us that space to grow.’
They’d spent the late afternoon taking photos with Steve Double throughout Madrid for the NME cover shoot, the epitome of kissing ugly arse for five men who hated posing for photos. It was their second NME cover shoot in four months. For the aborted first cover, Thom had especially worn a fluffy fake-fur coat and zany shades. Now, when Double asked him to put a large red flower in his mouth for the cover photo, Thom Yorke obliged. He knew what he had to do to get this over the line.
Back in London, I joined the weekly editorial meeting. I was surprised to learn that in my absence there had been a change of heart over the cover. It had been decided that Dodgy, a cheery power-pop trio from Hounslow who’d been knocking about at sixth on the bill at festivals for a few years already, were going on the cover instead.
How come?
‘The Radiohead photos are not cover-worthy,’ came back the verdict from Steve Sutherland. ‘Thom looks a dick with that flower in his mouth.’
‘He’s wearing shades too,’ continued the art editor. ‘Pictures are a bit dark …’
These were compelling answers. The previous year, I’d had a Beastie Boys story knocked off the front at the last minute for an Absolutely Fabulous-meets-Pet Shop Boys interview which I’d felt was a mistake at the time – the Beastie Boys’ third album Ill Communication was sweeping all before them, those Steve Double Beasties photos were fantastic and I really didn’t believe any NME reader bought the magazine because comedians Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French were on the front. I’d sulked, briefly. Occasionally, I’d bring it up when moaning about the powers that be in the pub even years later – ‘how can you believe in a magazine that thinks Absolutely Fabulous matters more to music fans than the Beastie Boys?!’ etc.
This time, though, I looked at the photos and knew they had a point. The Dodgy shoot was sunny, triumphant, the three of them throwing salutes on the quay of some Mediterranean port. They were about to reissue their ‘Staying Out for the Summer’ single. It had reached number 38 last year, but with a bit of production spit and polish and a gust of prevailing, feel-good Britpop wind in its sail, surely they had a seasonal hit on their hands. Thom had a big red flower in his mouth. There was no eye contact. The lighting was very gloomy.
I didn’t put up a massive fight, but I did sound a note of cautious protest.
‘Radiohead are a much more popular group than Dodgy,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going away. We’ve promised them the cover twice and have broken that promise both times; they’re going to be really pissed off …’
Steve shrugged. ‘Dodgy and Radiohead, it’s the devil or the deep-blue sea,’ he decided. ‘It’s the start of the summer. This week the story is going to be that Dodgy single, not old misery guts. Radiohead will get their chance.’
Dodgy went on the cover, with a drop-in of Thom with that flower in his mouth sitting in the top right-hand corner.
In the end, ‘Staying Out for the Summer’ only reached number 19 in the singles. It was very disappointing. Nobody could understand it. The Bends, meanwhile, has now sold nearly two million copies in the UK alone, three times that worldwide.
When NME did eventually put Radiohead on the cover at the end of 1995, the writer opened the piece describing a moody backstage scene against the band’s wishes. Yorke vowed to never speak to the magazine again. Enough was enough.
It was March 1998. The phone on my desk rang. This was not unusual. The phone on the NME features desk, which I was now the editor of, rings all day long. It was like a reverse Russian roulette. One call out of six is a lifesaver, the other five make you want to blow your brains out. This call, unusually, was neither.
‘Hello, Ted, it’s [insert name of go-getting young production assistant, classically a Chloe or a Will], we just wondered how you were getting on with that release form?’
How I was getting on with the release form was that I’d filed it under a stack of other bits of paper I didn’t want to think about three weeks earlier. I told them I hadn’t got to it yet. I was still thinking it over.
‘OK, understood, but we will need it back in the next week otherwise we’ll have to cut your contribution out.’
‘Can I see my bit yet?’
‘I’m sorry, no. Grant’s not showing anything for approval. It’s going to be really good though. What we’ve seen is amazing.’
One person’s amazing is another’s humiliating, of course. How good could my contribution be, I wondered.
A year earlier, in March 1997, I’d been the live reviews editor for NME when an unmissable commission arose. Radiohead were launching their new album, OK Computer, on 22 May in Barcelona with a small club show. Their label Parlophone would take a writer from NME over to document it. There would be no access to the band as they were also doing a Mojo exclusive cover there, but we’d be welcome to review the show, spending a couple of nights in the city.
I immediately commissioned myself. The album was clearly a work of era-defining genius and Barcelona in late spring is one of the best places to spend a couple of easy-paced days. It seemed like a win-win. And if the NME reviews editor can’t from time to time commission himself to do a sweet trip abroad, what was the point of any of it?
I went to the gig. I went to the aftershow party, where drink removed the legs from at least two visiting music-biz bigwigs. I walked throughout the city wearing shorts. Afterwards, I bashed out 600 words overnight and forgot all about it.
A few weeks later, I was promoted to features editor when Mark Sutherland left to edit Melody Maker. I thought when applying for the role that it was an ideal time to be commissioning the NME features and cover stories. Britpop was in bloom. The bands and artists I’d spent the previous four years covering were now all becoming household names. Some were even entering imperial phases, known globally as headliners. Acts like Oasis and Radiohead. My guys.
Quickly I realised that the time to become the NME features editor is when the good groups are on their way up, not when they’ve arrived in first class. More alarmingly, while first class was full, Coach was looking tatty. We had passed the tipping point of Britpop and the explosion of electronic dance acts by about eighteen months. British music was no longer in bloom. It was starting to rot, if you inspected the roots. The funny, interesting, gifted, big-mouth musicians who’d been in reception at NME for around three years – Jarvis Cocker, Richard Ashcroft, Justine Frischman, Noel and Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Liam Howlett, Tricky, Polly Harvey, Björk etc – were no longer a call away. Now, you got one interview every two years if you were lucky and they dictated the rules of access. The job was clearly more attritional. And rather than fighting for access with just Melody Maker, we were up against all the monthlies who viewed these acts as mainstream enough for covers now, as well as broadsheet magazines who also fancied a bit of Jarvis Cocker winking on the front of their Sunday magazine. NME was the bigger fish in the weekly music paper market, but now that this rabble of misfits were all bona fide pop stars, Smash Hits wanted a bite of that apple too. Suddenly, Q’s 250,000 copies every month alongside a Sunday Times Magazine cover became a very attractive counter-proposal for a PR pitching for business to a label meeting.
Filling the year’s fifty-one issues was less straightforward than before because the new acts were worse, so we had to engineer some smoke and mirror effects around them. That was easy enough. You could always dig deeper into the experimental margins, or into the US underground. The covers were harder. Ideally you required three core acts on the cover every month and one flyer, an outside bet. That was the cover ratio when I’d joined NME. Now that order was reversed. You aimed for at least one core act on the cover every month, the rest were hopeful punts or some kind of fluffed-up live review or news story. Death was dined upon for weeks.
This cover ratio was not helped by the two British guitar acts that NME really needed from the summer of 1997 onwards not really talking to the magazine any more.
Oasis had ascended to the stratosphere. I interviewed them for a cover in April that year. A quote by Noel Gallagher stating that he thought Oasis were probably bigger than God for kids at that moment – which was true: the church would struggle to fill Knebworth, even if it charged less than £22 a ticket – was lifted for the front pages of the Mirror, Daily Star and the Sun. BBC One’s Six O’Clock News ran it as a lead item. It all seemed so hysterical for a throwaway reply to a speculative question about the lyrics in ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’. The day the interview came out my colleague Paul Moody bumped into Noel striding down Marylebone High Street. Noel had passed by shouting, ‘Sorry, Paul, can’t stop. I’m being chased by the God squad!’
The issue sold well, the biggest of the year by a distance, nosing sales back over 100,000 after a slight dip. Joy and relief soon gave way to anxiety, however. That was our bash on the Oasis Teddy Picker. There was a host of international media now in line for them – we’d have to wait our turn, possibly at Christmas but more likely the following year. Noel had long ago taken offence at Steve Sutherland’s combative backing of Blur, amongst other things, so now he enjoyed making us dangle.
Meanwhile, Radiohead’s OK Computer was the year’s runaway hit album. Miles ahead of the rest. But they didn’t want anything to do with NME either, despite James Oldham giving it ten out of ten in our review. I called their idiosyncratic PR Caffy St Luce many times about this deadlock. Caffy, like Anton Brookes and other long-term independent PRs to the best acts, was an enthusiast, someone whose genuine love of the groups she handled was the reason she did them even after they became big business. She wasn’t a careerist, she was a diehard fan. That’s what Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers liked about her – they could trust and relate to her instincts. She, in common with many weekly music writers, with me, was a happy amateur suddenly playing a professional game. No doubt we all appeared endearingly out of our depth when confronted with genuine pros in management, at labels. It often seemed as though patient allowance was made for our kooky enthusiasm. None of which made securing an urgently necessary Radiohead cover any easier.
I’d call. I’d beg. I’d cajole. I’d use some of her other acts as bargaining chips, which was a no-no but I was desperate. I’d leave message after message. Caffy would apologise and say they couldn’t give an NME interview right now. Sometimes she’d say they were too busy. Eventually she just said that Thom was still too fucked off with you.
‘With me?’
‘No! Not just you, not you in particular.’ With the whole thing. The covers being pulled, the snidey picture captions, the stuff that had been printed when asked not to.
It all seemed fair to me.
I didn’t stop hassling her though.
Eventually, in late October, I suggested an idea that gave them pause for thought. OK Computer was going to win NME’s album of the year. Radiohead were on the last leg of that year’s mammoth world tour. Why don’t I come to the Berlin date and the final show, in Birmingham? I’d already been to the first one in May. I could write a piece for an end of year issue, along the lines of Barcelona, Berlin, Birmingham: six months with Britain’s best band. Something like that.
It went back and forth for a bit. It was unlikely that Thom or Jonny would talk to me for an interview. Drummer Phil Selway was probably sitting it out too. But Colin Greenwood and the other guitarist, the affable Ed O’Brien, would chat. The band would pose for photos, too, and I could hang out, go to the gigs. Soak it all up. How does that sound as a compromise?
I packed an overnight bag and took a cab at 5.30 a.m. for Stansted. Roger Sargent, Caffy St Luce and I were going to Berlin.
We arrived in the mid-morning of 2 November at Huxleys, a hangar-like Berlin venue where in 1930 Adolf Hitler had addressed an audience that included his future first architect, Albert Speer. For the first six hours or so that we were there that was the most interesting thing that I learned.
As soon as the band heard we’d arrived, they locked themselves in their buses. Jonny Greenwood, emerging from his bus, had accidentally bumped into us as we pulled up in a cab. In his haste to escape, he’d let the door lock on him so he was forced to greet us and show us the way into the venue. He immediately took flight once he’d deposited us with the road crew who were setting up the rig.
It was very cold. Roger Sargent set up some lights in a doorway and waited to take photos. I smoked a lot of cigarettes. We watched the soundman rollerskating around the venue’s floor as roadies coughed into microphones. Though no doubt enjoying herself, Caffy left us to get on with it, joining the band on one of their nice, warm buses.
After all our reserves of banter and bitching had run dry, Roger and I fruitlessly sought some warmth in the band’s empty dressing room. Eventually, Caffy arrived with Colin Greenwood in tow ahead of their soundcheck. Colin was very tired after a long run of shows, and I too was dopey as I wasn’t used to waking at 5 a.m. to stand in the cold for six hours, but he was nevertheless friendly.
We settled into chairs behind a small round table next to their changing room and spoke for forty-five minutes about how the year had been for the band, about the future for them, about his favourite albums of the year. That kind of thing. It was all pretty jovial. A few minutes before wrapping up, as I started to run through any topics in my mind I might have forgotten to raise, I became distracted by a bright white light entering the room behind me. I turned my head to face it and became aware of a camera crew walking slowly around the perimeter of the room with one tall man next to the camera operator rolling his hands at me to keep talking.
‘Are they filming us?’ I asked Colin. ‘It’s a bit weird having them walk in on us like this.’
‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Life’s so short, especially the life of a band. It’s nice to have a record of it for when we’re old and grey.’
Grant Gee, a documentary maker who’d worked with U2, was on tour with Radiohead filming everything they did for a film that they hoped would show the dual realities of touring and promotion. Later, they’d film Roger taking his photos and me interviewing Ed O’Brien too. They were recording everything.
‘Just ignore us and carry on please,’ said the tall, posh man at the front of the crew who I assumed was Gee.
The interview was pretty much over by this point, but we battled on for a few more minutes. I dredged up a question about the band’s schedule and Colin drifted off into a complaint about interviews and being interviewed, that ended with him apologising and pulling his hat over his eyes. I didn’t really know why he was apologising and told him so. He was the bassist. In normal circumstances he wouldn’t need to do quite as much heavy lifting in an NME cover story. It was all fine. I knew I could make it work. Don’t worry.
Grant Gee and his gang kept the cameras rolling. I shook my box of matches. Come on, please. Let’s stop filming.
I looked at the release form one more time. Most people said I should just sign it. What’s the worst that could happen? You’ll be in a Radiohead documentary. Biggest band in the world in 1998. You’ll be on telly.
In the back of my mind, I recalled something my dad had told me he regretted when I was growing up, about how he’d been involved in a car crash while covering a Middle East peace conference in Cairo in which his cab driver was killed and he received substantial head wounds. Afterwards, upon awaking in hospital, he recalled being distraught that he’d failed in his reporting.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because a reporter should never become the story.’
A reporter should never become the story.
I signed the release form. Who was I kidding? I was no reporter. I was an egomaniacal NME writer.
Less than three minutes into the premier of Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee’s film about Radiohead, I knew what I’d let myself in for.
In Berlin, before the band’s encore, Thom Yorke had thanked the audience for coming. ‘You’ve been good,’ he told them. ‘It’s a shame I haven’t been able to see any of your city today but our lives don’t seem to allow that any more. Our lives consist of just press, soundcheck, gig now …’
At the time I’d thought, Yeah, put a holiday request form in to HR with the rest of the mugs here. Now I knew it was a precis of the documentary his band were making about a year in their career.
Our lives consist of press, soundcheck, gig now. Look how miserable it is, living like this in black and white. Look at all the idiots we have to deal with.
A little way into Meeting People Is Easy, I appear: the last few minutes of the interview with Colin, when the camera crew have suddenly turned up and I’m desperately trying to think of some questions to string the conversation out as they’re instructing me to. Colin complaining about interviews, covering his face with his hat. Our apologies. A little bit of my chat with Ed, too. A passive-aggressive shake of my matchbox. Throughout the film, copy from their print interviews run down the screen. At one stage, a section of my cover story in which I poke fun at them avoiding me tumbles across the action. Even the drummer is giving us the bum’s rush, nicely …
Three thousand words for first thing Monday. Just bash it out. Nobody reads last week’s paper.
Meeting People Is Easy sold over half a million copies on DVD and VHS. In his New Yorker review, Alex Ross wrote that Meeting People Is Easy was a ‘counterstrike against the music press, recording scores of pointless interviews with dead-tired members of the band’.
In May 1999, Channel 4 screened it in full. In the days after, I was contacted by all kinds of blasts from my past. I went for pints with people I hadn’t seen since school. I was called by a couple of old girlfriends, and nearly girlfriends, who wondered how I was doing. Some Radiohead fans wrote mad letters in coloured crayon and blood to me at NME.
When Niall Doherty joined Q and took a seat opposite me twelve years later, he said that he felt as if he already knew me as he’d watched the Radiohead documentary so many times as a teenager. The passive-aggressive shake of the matchbox always made him laugh. Meeting People Is Easy. Radiohead meant the title sarcastically, but it actually became a prophecy for me. That film made contact with many good friends old and new possible.