The phone on the Live desk rings. I answer.
‘Hello, NME?’
‘Ted, it’s Pippa.’
‘Pippa! How are you?’
‘I’m OK, thanks. Look, I have a message from Paul that he’s asked me to deliver directly to you, so I apologise in advance.’
‘Right …’
‘Paul says this, I’ve written it down: “Tell that Ted Kessler that if he wants to give me a kick up the arse, he’s more than welcome to get on a train to Woking and try. I’ll be waiting for him.”’
‘Is he very unhappy about the review, then?’
‘He is. He thinks it’s really unfair.’
‘It’s a six out of ten. That’s 60 per cent. It’s a decent pass mark.’
‘I don’t think that’s how Paul sees it. He thinks it’s more of a ten out of ten album. He’s really cross about it.’
‘Ah, look. I’m a massive Paul Weller fan. I was in the Jam fan club, Pippa. I love that guy. He was my hero growing up. It’s not personal, it’s just this record.’
‘I know, Ted. It doesn’t make any difference to him. He’s taken it very badly.’
‘But I don’t think Stanley Road is a terrible album. Some of it is brilliant. “Broken Stones” is great. “The Changingman”, “Stanley Road” itself are both great. It’s just those M.O.R. ones, like “You Do Something to Me”. They’re a bit bland for me.’
‘Ted, you wrote it was “an old fart blues record”.’
‘Did I?’
‘I don’t think Paul likes being called an old fart or you writing that he needs a kick up the arse.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘It’ll probably blow over, but I’d steer clear of him for now.’
‘Understood. Sorry.’
‘Bye, Ted.’
The phone on the Features desk rings. I answer.
‘Hello, NME?’
‘Ted, it’s Pippa.’
‘Oh hi, Pippa! How are you?’
‘This is a difficult phone call, Ted.’
‘Not again.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he want me to come and try to kick him up the arse?’
‘No. He’s still not over that Stanley Road review, though.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘I told him that you were the NME writer for the cover but Paul’s not up for you interviewing him. He’s already offered to fight Stuart Bailie over his review this time.’
‘So I hear. Stuart’s quite up for it, you know. He’s from Belfast.’
‘I wouldn’t fancy his chances against Paul. Not in his current frame of mind about NME journalists. Look, he’s asked me to read you another message.’
‘OK, all ears.’
‘He says: “Tell Ted Kessler that he’s not a good enough writer to interview me, so they’ll have to find someone better.”’
‘Message received! I will commission someone else to interview Paul Weller in that case. Any preferences?’
‘As long as it’s not you or Stuart, we’ll be fine.’
Paul Weller looks at the grey brew I have placed in front of him.
‘Bit fucking anaemic,’ he summarises.
It looks terrible. Weak. Like me.
‘I’ll make us another round, shall I?’
Weller walks over to the sink in the kitchen, pours our teas away and refills the photo studio kettle.
‘This new bloke you’ve got,’ he says, dropping two fresh bags into our mugs. ‘Young is he?’
He is, I confirm.
Ben Knowles, the new NME editor, is twenty-six. NME’s youngest ever editor, as he likes to immediately tell everyone he meets. He’s the editor, I’m the features editor, an elderly thirty-one, and we are delivering some truly atrocious editions of the paper together. John Mulvey, thirty-two, is the deputy editor and trying to get away without being too tarnished by what is going out of the office on to the shelves every week, but these issues stain everyone. We are all complicit: editors, writers, designers, Stereophonics and Limp Bizkit. No one gets out alive.
Steve Sutherland had been shuffled upstairs after two years of nosediving sales, partly because NME looked like a midlife crisis, partly because music was in a devastating post-Britpop slump that was hospitalising all magazines, and partly because those in charge of publishing the likes of NME, Melody Maker and Select had collectively lost their minds. It was the overdue comedown. Nerves were shot. Talent was drained. Sales had plummeted. People were panicking.
When advertising the editor’s job, NME’s publisher Robert Tame encouraged all senior staff to apply, asking us for detailed documents about what we’d do to arrest decline, what roles would be changed, who was in, who was out. Then he gave the job to Ben Knowles, a Melody Maker writer who’d previously been on Smash Hits.
‘I’ve read all your documents,’ Ben told me with a grin when we first met. ‘Some interesting career ideas for each other there.’
His own pitch was simple, he told me. Much shorter than mine. He was going to bring all the best writers on board. And he would put all the biggest names in music exclusively on the cover. The publishers had loved these innovative ideas, he explained.
Reality had now refocused those ambitions somewhat. The week before this Paul Weller interview, the NME cover was made up of a screengrab of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic hip-hop character Ali G alongside the legend ‘why Ali G is the most rock ’n’ roll show on TV’. This week, London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone was on the front pretending to DJ in a brown suit with a yellow floral tie. The cover line read ‘Ken he kick it?’
‘He’s twenty-six,’ I reply to Weller. ‘NME’s youngest ever editor.’
‘That’s the way it should be,’ nods Weller, approvingly. ‘It shouldn’t be old cunts like me and Steve fucking Sutherland in charge of music.’
He places our brick-red mugs of tea on the Formica table. ‘What’s this interview about?’
‘We’ve got a new series called [swallow hard] “The Greats”, where we talk to living legends about their life’s work.’
‘Oh, I’m a great, am I? Fucking hell, last year NME said I’m a cunt. I think you wrote that.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Now they say I’m a great. That’s how it goes with you lot. I’ve seen it all before.’
1979: Climbing through my mother’s cupboard trying to feel for my Christmas present hidden behind the shoes and dresses. Cardboard square in a crinkly bag. Bingo. Drag it from the back into my parents’ bedroom and carefully pull out the album from the Our Price wrapper. Setting Sons by the Jam. By New Year’s Day I know every line by heart.
Saturday’s kids play one-arm bandits,
they never win but that’s not the point is it,
dip in silver paper when their pints go flat,
how about that – far out!
Still do.
1980, March: Cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV on a Thursday at 7 p.m., as ever. On Sunday, ‘Going Underground’ by the Jam had exploded the chart by landing directly at number one. A 60/40 split of punk and the Beatles blasting all competition to smithereens. I’d taped the top forty run-down as usual and listened to ‘Going Underground’ a few hundred times over the following four days. It was the best song I’d ever heard. I couldn’t understand why it was louder than every other entry. How they made that bass wobble sound at the end. What was eating Paul Weller – kidney machines? Atomic crimes? – but it was so sleek, its fury so precise, a bullet of melody and violence straight to my eleven-year-old heart. Here’s Paul Weller wearing an apron inside out on Top of the Pops. Should I be wearing one too?
1980, September: Climbing from the bus outside my new French school for the first day. I am wearing tassel loafers, grey Sta-Prest trousers, a black Fred Perry polo with a gold logo and a black Harrington jacket. On my lapel, there’s one badge: The Jam. I am hopeful that by wearing my very best budget-Weller outfit I will impress my new classmates. That does not happen. There are no other Jam fan mods in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. But there are lots of greasy metalhead teenagers who spend most breaks looking to hang me from the toilet door by my underpants.
1982: The Dear John letter nobody desires. Paul Weller is splitting the Jam up at the tender age of twenty-four, but he needs us, his loyal official fan club members, to hear it directly from him. He’ll be back, he explains, but in the meantime he urges us to stay cool, clean and hard. Paul x. I promise I’ll try.
1983: He has kept his word and returned with a new band whose aesthetic is moulded from a romantic vision of Parisian culture. That’s weird, I think. I live in Paris. One of the Style Council’s first EPs that I buy is called À Paris: in Paris. It is accompanied by a lavish set of photos of Weller and colleague Mick Talbot wistfully drinking espressos on Parisian café terraces or mooning around on Place d’Italie at dusk. Its release coincides with my own relationship to the city vastly improving, of also taking young companions to drink two-franc coffees, of marching through Paris with pals on silly night-time adventures, and I can’t help thinking he’s trying to tell me something. When the Style Council come to town, I sleep in a doorway huddled up to fellow English teenagers near L’Eldorado because I missed the last train after watching their encore. We shiver through to dawn singing ‘You’re the Best Thing’, off-key.
1995: I write in NME that Paul Weller’s new album Stanley Road is ‘old fart blues’ music and that he should expand his influences, that he needs a kick up the arse.
Without wishing to scare him off, I now explain to Weller my relationship to his back catalogue, to his sartorial philosophy, to his sound and vision, and apologise for using unkind language in my Stanley Road review. I wasn’t mad about the record, that’s all. I know lots of other people loved it. The review made no tangible difference: it’s his most commercially successful solo album. I thank him for allowing me to interview him after all that. He accepts this and explains why he offered to fight me.
‘I’m naturally very defensive,’ he replies, ‘because I’ve had to defend my existence to people like you since I was eighteen. It’s been constant. I’m very defensive but if they could see it from my stick they’d understand. Why have you done this? Why have you said that? Always trying to catch you out, trip you up, letting me know how crap they think I am since I was eighteen. It ain’t easy having everyone scrutinise you.’
I apologise for my language again, suggesting his life must have been as pressurised at times as David Beckham’s, whose existence in 2000 was much discussed.
‘Yeah, it has,’ he agrees. ‘Only with much better hair.’
Before leaving, I hand over a mix CD of new music I’ve made him and he signs a CD of his current album, wishing me all the best. We have a cordial agreement.
A few weeks later, the Features desk phone rings.
‘Hello, NME?’
‘Hi, Ted, it’s Pippa.’
‘Pippa.’
‘Paul liked the piece, so thanks for that. We wondered if you wanted to do his EPK [electronic press kit] next week?’
We are reconciled.
An email arrives from Ben Knowles inviting me to a meeting with him in an hour, at 5 p.m., in his office. It’s very formal. Robert Tame is copied. Ben’s office is about ten feet from my desk. Why is he emailing?
John Mulvey has also received the same invitation, timed for ten minutes earlier. As John leaves the office and passes by me on my way in, he shakes his head, his eyes wide.
I step in and take a seat. Robert Tame is sitting on the other seat next to me wearing a black polo neck and pinstripe suit trousers. Poker-faced, he looks like an estate agent dressed as the Milk Tray man.
‘There are going to be a few changes at NME,’ Ben explains.
I am not surprised, but it is still hard to hear. John Mulvey will no longer be deputy editor and I will be leaving the features editing job. It’s time to change the staff dynamic for the new year, he explains.
‘What I’d like to suggest for you,’ says Ben, ‘is that you become our senior writer.’
‘Senior writer? Is that a job?’
‘You’ll be paid exactly what you are now. It’ll be on a year’s contract.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we see where we are.’
‘Right. What about John?’
‘John’s leaving.’
‘Will I still have a desk?’
‘No, we can’t do that for insurance reasons. You’ll be based at home, but we’ll still expect you to come in for meetings and to fulfil a set number of words every month.’
‘Can I write for other publications?’
‘Within reason. No EMAP titles, obviously.’
‘So I’ll be freelance.’
Robert Tame steps in to close this down. ‘What we’re offering, Ted, is a unique opportunity. Nobody else has this deal in IPC. You’ll be paid a year’s salary, you are guaranteed high-profile work with NME, but you can also top that up with work elsewhere. It’s a really good resolution. Ben does need to make the magazine his own.’
‘We could have offered you just the settlement money,’ adds Ben. ‘But I really feel that you have a lot to offer us as a writer. A magazine like NME needs a senior writer, someone who leads from the front informing the paper’s voice, someone to help guide the younger writers. It’s a vital role and you are the ideal person for it. I really need you to do it.’ I look at Ben. He’s good at this, the chat. I can see finally how he got the job. I’d approached my interview for the editor’s role like a conversation under police caution.
‘OK,’ I reply, ‘well, give me the weekend please to think it over, but it sounds like I’ll be senior writer.’
‘You should think of this as an opportunity,’ Ben continues. ‘You know when I first thought of you for this role?’
I don’t.
‘After that Paul Weller interview. I was talking to my mum about it, she loved it, the fact you’d mentioned I was the youngest NME editor as she was such a huge Jam fan. And I thought, well, I wonder how we make the most of those writing skills, it’s probably not chained to a desk commissioning features, editing copy, it’s getting out there …’
And here we have it.
‘And here we have it.’
I’m out on my arse with the rest of the clowns …
As I leave the office, I wonder if I’ll ever get another staff position anywhere again.
We cannot always comprehend the eras of great personal change when in their midst. Heading over the Brentford flyover Paul Weller is charging towards his new self at eighty miles per hour. Despite the great speed he is travelling at, it will take him some years to arrive at his new destination. The journey has begun, however.
He rolls down the window in the front passenger seat and lights a cigarette, passing the packet back to me over his shoulder.
‘Roger,’ he shouts to his faithful guitar tech Roger Nowell, who is holding the wheel. ‘Rog, stick “Razorblade” on again.’
On Monday we went to a shisha café on Edgware Road, right around the corner from my childhood flat, and spoke into my Dictaphone for the Q Interview slot while sucking on fruit-flavoured pipes. His final words to me as we embraced by his bus stop were ‘we’ll have a drink Thursday’.
Today, Thursday, we have had a drink. First, we had a drink in his Black Barn studio control room while he blasted me music that he’s been working on. Afterwards, we went to the pub around the corner in the village of Ripley, a leafy nick upon Surrey’s stockbroker belt. We had a few drinks there. Then, hungry, we knocked back a curry at the local Indian restaurant. While we waited for Roger to return with his car so he could drive us back to London, we returned to the pub and enjoyed a couple of quick-fire pints and chasers.
Now, we’re heading to the K West Hotel in Shepherd’s Bush for a nightcap.
Throughout our afternoon and evening together, our companion has been ‘Razorblade’ by the Strokes, a song from their recently released First Impressions of Earth album. ‘Are you having that Strokes album?’ Weller asked soon after I’d walked up the gravel path to Black Barn. ‘“Razorblade”’s a tune, man.’
In four years, the hangovers will defeat Paul Weller, the black moods that accompany the binges will need to be banished. Sodden and exhausted, he will renew as a sober man. Softer, kinder and more aware of those around whom he orbits. Even more productive, too. Hard to imagine right now, but it’s coming at him in the distance, ready to swallow him up, demanding change.
Now, though, he leans out of the window as we flash over the motorway into West London at midnight, singing the words to ‘Razorblade’ by the Strokes at the top of his voice, lost in melody and the moment. Oh, razor blade, that’s what I call love …
He twists around to check that I’m singing too, and I’m singing too. He takes a smoke from the pack on the seat next to me and turns back towards the highway.
‘Stick it on again, Rog!’ he shouts.
Stoic, gothic man of Yorkshire Roger presses play and the drums roll, the guitars race through the vehicle at top volume and, heads thrown back, we all sing. We all sing.
Occasionally, when he has a new album due, he’ll text. Turns out he wants to know what you think after all.
Monday 11 Jan 2021: Ted did Polly send u the album yet? And if so any thoughts on it!!
I reply that I have just played Fat Pop for the first time – which I have – and that I think it sounds great so far.
Ah good! Well spk soon and take care man x
A month later, on 15 February, I leave my East London postcode for the first time since November, when the most recent Covid-19 lockdown was pronounced. I climb into a record company cab and make the enjoyably long trip across the city and out into the Surrey countryside to visit Paul Weller at Black Barn Studios. I’m going to interview him for Mojo. When I arrive, he’s outside having his photo taken for the cover, smoke travelling up the red Harrington sleeve from his fingers behind his back. He gives me a firm, modsexual welcome hug. I’ll never get used to Paul Weller embracing me.
His hair is longer and his manner gentler than ever. As usual, he wishes to know how you are, how your family are, what any mutual acquaintances may be up to. Heard any good music? He is warm and welcoming, despite the provocation of the various pieces of Chelsea Football Club memorabilia that vie for attention in amongst the old Motown, Beatles and pop culture artefacts proudly on show throughout his studio and the cottage at the end of the garden. He stays in that whitewashed villa while working down here, with his band living in the adjoining house, like the Monkees.
A decade of sobriety has softened his edges, but you can also more clearly see the melancholia seeping into him as he ages, like water eating at blotting paper. He started work and creating early, he did everything he could to beat the clock. He has produced hundreds of recorded pieces of original music, as well as many beautiful children across a spectrum of ages, from adult to nipper. But here he is, aged sixty-two. He’s not getting any younger. None of us are. ‘I feel the weight of mortality very strongly,’ he agrees.
We ask the photographer Nicole Nodland to take a picture of us together outside in the winter sun. Who knows when I’ll see him again?
A few days later, on Sunday, a text arrives from Weller at 22.58, as I’m reaching for the bedside lamp.
As I was ruminating earlier can I add that my gratitude to music is boundless. I’d still be scratching about in my old town if it wasn’t for music! I possibly would never have travelled, met so many great people from all over the world, seen beyond the confines of the UK & how much we have in common. When soul heads say ‘keep the faith’, that’s exactly what it is: a faith. Pure & simple. Music’s forever giving, it’s a living thing, it’s not started wars (fights, yeh), it cuts through all cultures, it’s information, education, entertainment. And generally it tells the truth! That’s all … just had to say that! X
For a day or so, I’ve been contemplating an ending to the piece, but now I climb from bed and walk to the kitchen table. There I transpose the text and tap in the open goal of the pay-off he’d laid on for me. The heart has many desires, I write, but for Paul Weller there is just one constant, uncomplicated, lifelong love. That’s just how he is and why he needs you so.
I feel the unbeatable satisfaction of a final full stop and return to bed, silently praising Paul Weller’s exquisite timing in my head as I drift off. He’s always been there for me.