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First sentence, first paragraph

What do you usually start with when working on a new piece?

First sentence, then first paragraph... if you can get your first sentence right then I feel that everything in the piece is somehow coiled in there and implied by it. Normally I will pick up on a phrase, a statement, a particular moment and I will feel it vibrating inside my body ready to cut loose. I never take notes, I just let things percolate inside me to the point of explosion, then I dash it down, re-read it and if it's right I tidy it up, the first sentence or two, then I walk away and come back to it which is when the bulk of the work begins. As long as I have that opening, the correct rhythm in the first sentence or two, I can normally relax and know that it’s is all in there somewhere, that I have captured it, still alive, and writhing, trapped in there waiting for me to tease it out or otherwise seduce it. 

Rhythm is incredibly important to me. I hate an un-rhythmic sentence, a clumsy turn of phrase. If it doesn’t swing – and I have an odd sense of swing for sure – it must have that quality of musicality, of feel, somehow, this biologic sense of rhythm to work for me, otherwise it’s ugly, forget it. 

Also, I like to write at night, I have to write at night. It’s a waste of a night if I don’t write something, be it working on commissions, a novel, liners etc. I write almost every night of my life and it’s my favourite thing to do. I do understand the terror that writers talk about when faced with the blank page, no matter how many times you successfully pull off a great piece of writing it feels like you are always back to square one every time you start over. It’s amazing and exciting and so weird and it never gets any easier. It's still my first and truest love and I am addicted to it and I don’t know what I would do with myself without it. 

Tell us a bit about the selection process for deciding on what to write about, please. What sources will you draw from for research purposes and how much time goes into research, information gathering and fact-checking in general?

I am an obsessive researcher. I hate to get things wrong. Though mostly I draw from my own stack of knowledge. I have been collecting books and records since my teens, my house is like a crazy archive, and I turn to my own collection before I would ever Google something, somehow that feels like cheating, if you’re writing about something you should be an expert in it, you should be the one that is best versed in it. Unfortunately I’m seeing a lot of writers now whose sole source of information you can tell comes straight from the internet. You can tell if someone lives and breathes it or if they have to look it up, it’s there in the feel.

As more and more people are producing and releasing music, there has been an exponential growth in promotion agencies. What's your perspective on the promo system? In how far is it influencing your choice of articles and topics, in how far is it useful for pre-selection, in how far do you feel it is possibly undermining journalistic freedom?

I am completely outside of it, no one gets in touch, those that do I ignore. I am beyond influencing and driven like a monomaniac towards writing about things that I love and nothing else. The only influence promo people have on me is I’m less likely to write about it if they reach out, ha ha. I am a purist in that way.

How do you see the role of music journalism in the creative process? Should it amplify public taste, distinguish the good from the bad, inform, promote artists, or, as Howard Mandel put it, “illuminate, educate and entertain” readers? Do you feel that, as part of your work, music needs to be explained or should it retain its “inexplicable nature”?

Definitely it should remain inexplicable. It is inexplicable, ultimately. I try to create a context, an aura, a feel but I try to do that from nowhere. I hate to come out of any school, to try and rationalise art/music according to some ism or school of thought. I hate that. I like writing because it is a lonely, private, non-collaborative pursuit. I’m not a joiner. I dislike group thought or large gatherings of people. I would hate to be simply voicing or advancing some kind of critical or socio-political standard that I inherited or read about in a book like most writers. 

I want to live the art/music beyond ideas. To me I can’t read a book without wanting to live it, I can’t listen to music without wanting to play it, to see how it walks down the street. It has to become a part of my life. I write about it from the inside. I can’t be dispassionate. I am always disappointed to meet authors or musicians or other music writers and find that they are ordinary and dull and that what they do seems to have had no impact on the way they live their lives or how they hold themselves or what they do on a day-to-day basis or the originality of their conversation. 

I am allergic to ordinariness and I can’t understand people who don’t let art and music affect them to the point that their very existence is permanently re-formatted. Otherwise what’s the point? But I find I don’t have much in common with many music writers or authors in general. I like to look good, I like to keep in good shape, I like to fight, I box every week, I’ve been boxing for years, I like to look after myself, I love beautiful women and stylish men, I like good food and good beer, I like fine things, I like to smell good. I find that people involved in underground or alternative culture – on the whole - are simply buying into yet another orthodoxy or way of being where there are certain standards and rules of behaviour and political suppositions and interests and looks, even. I am not into that at all and can’t relate to it. That is why I am most attracted to unique people, to one-offs, to extraordinary lives. That’s what I most want to capture in my profiles, the personality of the artists, the way they live their lives as a total artwork, voracious artists like Peter Brotzmann and Derek Bailey. But I also find extraordinary people in all walks of life, which is why I also like to move in fighting circles and drinking circles and fashion circles and wilderness circles and magickal circles and astronomy circles. Anything that isn’t ordinary and that might attract extraordinary people. Otherwise I need to get the hell away from it.

 


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