my adventures in rock journalism

I started my new job in a new department on monday. It's so much more fun. I just love it. Less boring routine stuff and more cool interesting stuff. I've been ecstatically all week. I danced out of the handover meeting in my old department on monday morning. Politically this may not have been sensible but what the fuck? That job was stressful and, so far, this one is cool.

The title of this post is 'my adventures in rock journalism'. When I was a kid all i wanted to be was a ROCK STAR. Kinda like kurt cobain without the icky blowing your head off bit or like shaun ryder without the pharmaceutical sponsorship. And if I couldn't be an actual rock star (cos face it, i'm not that pretty and the chicks don't dig me that much) i wanted to be a ROCK JOURNALIST. When I thought about maybe the rock stars would give the journalists some of the left-over groupies as a sort of promo thing.

That is how the mind of a fourteen year old guy works.

I actually gave it a shot.

At university, as I have previously mentioned, I wrote for the newspaper. I reviewed CDs and I interviewed a few bands. It kinda sucked.

The first band that I interviewed was an american alt-country band who made a few critically acclaimed CDs. They were called 'horse-sparkle' or something like that. Work it out, anagram fans. They were a bit weird.

The singer guy had problems. He had recently had a near death experience. He allegedly took lots of drugs and then fell over and lay on the floor for a while. His muscles got damaged messing up his kidneys and he had several nasty infections.

During the interview he was trying to freak me out. He had a bottle of perscription drugs (painkillers I think) and he swallowed them by the handful during the interview. He seemed really shy and edgy. He asked me what i studied at uni (biology) then he told me how he used to break into the medical school in his home town and play with the corpses. He may have said something even more disgusting but I can't really remember. He just seemed like a cock.

He only brightened up when I asked him about literature. He liked cormac mccarthy. It was the only thing that he seemed at all interested in. Other then drugs (opiod drugs I think). The cello player was nicer. She liked the butthole surfers whuch impressed me. My finished article gave more column inches to the buttholes than the band I interviewed.

Another group that I was meant to interview was the Beta Band. They just fucked me about for a week setting up meeting times and then cancelling them. They were a bunch of total wankers and their tour manager was king tosser. I'm not bitter. I got two tickets for the gig for free. I sold one of them making a tidy profit. Some of their records were good.

The worst thing I did was interview a close friend of mine who is in a successful noise rock band. I stitched him up. I asked questions like 'don't you think the guy in embrace is a knob?' andhe would agree saying 'talentless bastard. you can't polish a turd!'. When I wrote the interview up I made my questions more innocent - 'what do you think of the current music scene?' - while keeping my mates answers. (This was the interview where I slipped the c-word into the paper regular readers). My pal was told off by his manager. The interview was pretty good though.

I eventually decided against journalism because I don't have the killer instinct. I wouldn't want to publish a story if I thought it would hurt someone. Journalism appealed to me in the truth and justive, investigative watergate way but in reality it seemed to be dirty little men telling dirty little stories.

And the rock stars wouldn't give me any women.

phunks