EP.243 - KATE MOSSMAN

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing, podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I'm back where I belong on my Norfolk farm track and I'm here with my best dog friend, Rosie Buxton.

Half whippet, half poodle,

all genius.

Isn't that true, dog legs?

Don't patronize me.

I apologise.

May I say though, Rose, without patronizing you, that you are looking so beautiful.

Rosie had quite a radical trim the other day.

While I was in London, in fact, it happened.

And I called my wife, asked how Rosie was doing.

She said, I don't know if you're going to be pleased.

The dog groomer gave her quite an extreme makeover.

She said she doesn't really look like Rosie anymore.

I was quite nervous.

But I think it was just that moment after you get a very extreme haircut when you're still getting used to it.

And you think, Oh, maybe that was a mistake.

But then, usually, you hit the sweet spot a week or two afterwards, it starts to grow out a bit, and you get used to the look.

That's where we're at with Rosie.

I just think she's looking wonderful.

She was getting a bit shaggy before, anyway.

Now, she's looking sleek and more whippety.

And

would it be okay to say plush?

Too late now, isn't it?

Oh, Rosie

so soft and strokey

how you doing anyway podcats I hope you're very well I'm doing all right thank you I'm about two-thirds of the way through recording my audio book should be finished next week gonna see Joe Cornish

he's gonna come by and record some bonus waffle the audio book is gonna be out with the physical copy next month May the 22nd

and there is a link in the description of today's podcast for you to pre-order including the chance for you to pre-order from a local independent bookshop in Norwich, The Book Hive.

And if you order through them, then you have the option to get a signed copy.

You can specify the message you want me to write in it as well.

As long as it's not offensively insane or too long.

Let's go through here, Rosie.

Oh.

It's a little bit brambly hedge.

Are you right there?

Come through.

There you go.

Alright, right.

Cool.

Now we're on the side of a nice field and we're avoiding a bird cannon, so all is good.

Okay, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 243.

This one features a rambling conversation with British journalist and author Kate Mossman.

Now I first came across Kate's writing on music in the 2000s and she was the reviews editor for The Word.

That was a music and culture magazine run essentially by former Old Grey Whistle Test presenters David Hepworth and Mark Ellen.

I remember in those days being struck by how passionate and positive The Word magazine was compared to some other music magazines that were around at the time.

And I really appreciated the fact that The Word seemed, to me at least, to be interested in more kind of thoughtful celebrations of things that its writers were into.

They didn't do much stuff at all on things they thought were totally shit.

Shortly after joining the staff of the word in 2008, Kate Mossman wrote a piece that I really loved.

It was about going out to rural France to interview British musician Kevin Ayres,

who I was a fan of.

He was one of the founders of the band Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt.

former housemate of Brian Eno.

Anyway, when Kate went out to France to meet him, he was at a point in his life when he wasn't doing especially well and the piece she wrote struck me as being really nicely written but also unusually tender and empathetic.

So afterwards I always looked out for Kate's writing.

In 2012 she became the arts editor at the British political and cultural news magazine The New Statesman, where she wrote profiles of acts like Kiss, Ray Davies and John Bon Jovi.

Kate is now the new statesman's main profile writer, working across the arts and politics, but her writing also appears in The Guardian, The Observer, and The Times.

She also pops up on Radios 4 and 2 from time to time, and in several documentaries for Sky Arts and the BBC over the years, she did an hour-long documentary for BBC4 in 2015 called When Pop Ruled My Life, in which, with help from artists and other music nerds like herself, she explored the mysterious forces at play in the relationship between fans and the objects of their obsessions.

In Kate's case, that was the band Queen.

Kate also fronted the following year, 2016, a great dock about the experience of women rock stars called Girl in a Band, in which she spoke to, among others, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Viv Albertine of The Slits, and friend of the podcast, Mickey Bereni of Lush.

But it's Kate's encounters with the elder statesmen of rock that she's written about for her first book, Men of a Certain Age.

Titled, as you will hear in our conversation, before

MasterChef presenter Greg Wallace dismissed complaints of inappropriate behavior made against him as being from, quotes, a handful of middle-class women of a certain age.

Ah, that was the big story back in December 2024.

Remember those days?

It was a simpler time.

Men of a Certain Age contains interviews with Kate's queen idols, Brian May and Roger Taylor, and also features her encounters with, among others, Wilco Johnson, Nick Cave, Sting, Jeff Beck, and Senanda Maitreya,

formerly known as Terence Trent Darby.

That piece, written for the New Statesman in 2015, turned out to be the first of Kate's pieces to go viral in the social media age, or at least that was the first time she knew that a piece she was writing was going to go viral, because people were fascinated with the idea of Terence Trent Darby having rebranded himself so completely.

The second time that Kate knew a piece she was writing was going to go viral was in 2021, when she interviewed interviewed a man who was not himself a musician but had had his life transformed after being immortalized in song by a female legend of music.

Who was it?

I'm not telling you.

It's Atis.

You'll find out in my conversation with Kate, which was recorded face to face in London in March of this year, 2025.

And as well as talking about some of the rock royalty in Men of a Certain Age, we discussed her queen issues

and we talked about the extent to which the relationship between father and daughter informs Kate's feelings about some of her older male musical idols.

I really love the book, in case that isn't clear.

Would highly recommend it.

And it was great to be able to talk with Kate, who is so articulate about two of my favourite subjects: music and parents.

I'll be back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now, with Kate Mossman, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat.

La

la

This is your first book?

My first book, yes.

Wow, congratulations.

Yeah, it was quite fun.

I just wrote it over about seven months of Friday mornings for some reason.

And I didn't really edit any of it.

I just kind of poured it out and then went home.

And then the next Friday I'd sit down and pour a bit more out and went home.

Oh, I wish I could have done that.

All I poured out was like pouring out one sentence at a time.

And what is your book?

It's another memoir.

It's called I Love You Buy.

Both my book titles, the first one was called Ramble Book, have been suggested by my comedy wife, Joe Cornish.

He's got a good instinct for a grabby title.

If it was left down to me, I think I wanted to call my first book Tangents.

Tangents.

Oh, yeah, that's quite abstract, isn't it?

Yes.

So he laughed at that and said, no, call it Ramble Book, mate.

Yeah, yeah.

I was lying on the floor outside my daughter's room.

She takes about an hour and a half to go to bed.

And suddenly, men of a certain age came to mind for my book.

And I knew it was the right one because it was actually before the Greg Wallace thing.

But I'd always hated that phrase, women of a certain age.

I still couldn't believe when I'd hear people say it in the kind of, you know, the 21st century.

And I thought, it doesn't often get flipped around.

So that sort of felt right.

But it was also a little bit too litery at first for a rock book, people thought.

But they've got used to it now.

Oh, it's good.

And also, it got that great Wallace boost.

Exactly.

I have a lot to thank him for.

Yeah.

When did you realise that you were going to compile just interviews with blokes?

Well, it was sort of a source of embarrassment throughout my entire career that I was drawn to.

the older male rock star.

I didn't really notice it at first, but then when I started working at the New Statesman, it became a running joke because obviously that's politics magazine and why was I trying to do John Bon Jovi in it and stuff.

So I was allowed the free rein, but always with a bit of a dig.

And so over time I realised that there was something going on rather powerful with my unconscious about these figures.

And I guess I've got to a point in life now where I thought maybe I should look at that and maybe I should accept that there was a bit of a sort of strange pull towards this figure.

There are other musicians out there and there are female musicians out there, there, but I wasn't really interested in interviewing them.

I always wanted to do the old guys.

When did your writing career start?

2007, after a sort of pilgrimage to go and find Glenn Campbell in Malibu, who was at that point not a kind of, you know, granite-hewn face of country music.

He was completely down the dumper and he was in his early 60s.

And he was doing a gig with Jimmy Webb, who wrote Witch to Alignment and all those songs.

And I just decided to go on my own.

How old were you then?

26.

And I was working at a children's charity, and somebody said to me, You can't do that trip unless you write about it, because it was 5,000 miles, it was self-funded, I didn't have a car, and I wasn't even going to meet him or anything.

I just needed to be in the same square mile.

And I actually started to write then, wrote a little piece on that, sent it around the old music magazines.

You know, you could go into borders and open them up and get the addresses of an editor or even call an editor, which was amazing.

They might pick the phone up.

So it started back then so were you totally obsessed with glen campbell completely from what age from well it was weird he was the second big music obsession because queen was the first but glen campbell kind of came in when I was a student and and then really gripped me in my mid-twenties and I can't really explain why but it's something about a deep sense of peace and calm that comes over my entire body whenever I hear his music so it was almost like a physical thing not that much interest in his personality his jokes were pretty bad.

He had the classic sort of country music, wild whiskey and coke, as in cocaine, kind of fuelled lifestyle.

I wasn't that interested in that, but there was something about his ability to take a song, because he didn't write any songs, and like do the ultimate cover version of it.

Lightness of touch, speed it up, like a fairy just dancing through the music.

And that's what I hear in all his music.

He didn't do the original version of Rhinestone Cowboy.

No, he just had a great ear for driving along, presumably in a freeway in LA, when he's working for Capital, and putting the radio on and then hearing something like Gentle My Mind or Rhinestone Cowboy and thinking, oh, that's a hit for me.

And then he would take it and it would be a hit for him when it hadn't necessarily been for the previous person.

Who did the first version of Witcher Tour Lineman then?

That was for him.

Oh, that was for him.

That was for him.

So Jimmy Webb wrote that for him, as I understand, when he'd just come out of being a session man in the wrecking crew.

And Webb's like, okay, this is one for you.

So I think he recorded that in a couple of hours.

So it was something about the appearance of effortlessness

and the idea that he seemed to click into like a higher state or something when he was playing and singing that I just, I was drawn to.

It's weird.

Wichita Alignment's quite a song.

Yeah.

My son has just learned how to play that on the guitar.

He was playing it this morning as I left the house.

Really?

Yeah, I was listening.

I was thinking, oh, his voice is sounding nice.

And I think, what's he singing?

And yeah.

So he was playing D D D D D.

He was doing the...

I didn't hear it.

No, he was strumming.

He was actually doing acoustic version of the guitar.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's beautiful.

And it's too short as well, like a lot of the best songs.

It should have another verse.

It leaves you wanting more.

It just fades out in like a really 60s way.

It's perfect.

And so you go off to meet Glenn Campbell, you write your piece about him.

And was that a good experience, though?

Did you actually meet him?

I met him.

It was a strange era where his daughter, he had seven kids, and his daughter was a kind of active figure on a Glenn Campbell message forum in about 2006.

And she was part-time as an air hostess for Delta Airlines, and she performed in his band.

So it was this weird era before fan sites became corporate websites selling merch and stuff.

And it was actually just a conversation between real people.

And I emailed her directly and I said, I'm coming all the way from the UK to your dad's gig.

Is there any way I could meet him?

And she just said, I'll see what I can do.

Did she say, How mentally balanced are you?

Well, this was it.

Yeah, this.

And actually, when I did meet him, it was a very short exchange at the side of a stage in Pepperdine University.

And she pulled me up to him and said, Dad, Kate's come all the way from London to meet you.

And I just said, yeah, how bad is that?

And then I just like almost shouted, how bad is that?

And it was something I was thinking about in the book as well.

When you're a journalist, particularly when you're a music journalist, there's quite a lot of kind of shame bound up in the strength of your feelings for these people that you're following around and trying to show that you're a professional and you're getting the story when, in fact, your heart is just hammering in your ribcage and you just can't believe you've met your idol.

It's very strange.

Yeah, well, it's a really interesting asymmetry to use a podcast word.

Did you ever used to say asymmetry about 10 years ago?

I did quite a lot.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

Oh, there you go.

You were on the asymmetry bus early days.

But it's a theme that runs through the book: is that, well, it investigates the relationship between the fan and the rock star, but of course it's a two-way thing.

And one of the main motifs in the book, I suppose, is the relationship between a father and a daughter.

You talk about your own relationship with your dad.

And there is that element, that dynamic there in your relationship with some of these older rock stars.

But of course, it's different because it's...

you know, it's not a father and a daughter.

It's a sexy old rock star, you know sexy young woman and maybe there's a few sparks there but were you aware of that dynamic when you were writing the pieces first time round I think I relied on the dynamic without understanding what it was so it was like a kind of weird glowing sense of recognition and affinity which was probably all completely in my head so imagine the rock star they bring to the sort of younger female journalists they bring all their kind of associations with groupies and fans backstage and stuff.

And I do remember that there was kind of palpable relief on the faces of an old rocker when I turned up because they were used to being interviewed by men their own age.

Yeah,

who were trying to sort of show that their knowledge was like completely watertight about the band's back catalogue or maybe like ask really shitty questions like, well, why did your second album fail?

and things like that.

Whereas when they saw me, something in them was like, oh, it's just a lady.

It's okay.

I can relax now.

So So I kind of picked up on that unconsciously.

And it would make me maybe more playful and maybe bolder than I might be with an older woman who I really admired, like a Joni Mitchell.

I couldn't be playful with a Joni Mitchell in the same way because sort of the High Priestess, you know,

I'd be terrified that she wouldn't like me.

Whereas I kind of assumed that these guys would on some weird level.

And I think that goes on in all sorts of interview dynamics.

I interviewed Lynn Barber recently, and she always preferred the older man, younger woman dynamic.

She loved that sense of sparring that was

good-natured, like a cheeky, clever young girl and a kind of dad figure telling them about the world.

And were you conscious, or maybe you just weren't that kind of person, were you conscious of the need not to flirt or to let it feel like flirting?

Luckily, I wasn't that kind of person.

I went to a girls' school.

I didn't know how to be around a man until I was about 30 after lots of internet dating.

I kind of assumed that if any man showed an interest in me, I had to be their girlfriend.

So that was like the first point.

And that's what a lot of people who go to girls' schools feel.

You've got to be grateful for any male attention.

And I also didn't know how to show that I liked people, which is partly why I was drawn to the older man because they were sort of quote unquote safe.

But of course, underneath that, there's all this stuff boiling away about father-daughter stuff and all this funny energy that is not really that.

I I mean, it's live, shall we say?

It's not unsafe, but it's live.

But also, in a modern context, that relationship feels less safe, perhaps.

And there are so many stories about predatory older men that we're familiar with now

that it's hard not to think, well, careful, young Kate.

Yeah.

You know, and my clumsy question about flirting, I suppose, was more about like,

did you ever feel unsafe?

Did you ever feel like, oh, I've got to be careful here?

I never felt unsafe, but I was thinking about my encounter with Kiss, which was one of my

the most fun ever.

KISS got in touch and said they wanted to do a piece which again is weird.

Why with the new statesman?

But they're clever about their legacy like that.

They thought it would be long and thoughtful.

And I said okay well I'd like to do it in Moscow because I could see they were playing there.

And this was just when Putin was starting to show his late stage.

Things were really, there were protests about the treatment of gay people in Chechnya going on.

There were literally, it was May Day that I went over there and there were people being bundled into the back of vans for protesting against the treatment of gay people and so it was things were really starting to feel quite tense and KISS themselves were doing this big gig that was for kind of everybody who didn't want to hear the song of the vulgar boatman and KISS were fantastic but they I did notice this amazing transformation when they got into their 50 pound metal uniform which put a foot on their height.

So they were like these space clowns kind of sailing down the corridor with these perfect white faces and the makeup kind of took 25 years off them and they became instantly flirtatious when they were in character.

Whereas they were kind of gross like when they didn't have I mean Gene Simmons himself like described his appearance as like a baby dog at birth at best

without his his clothes on and then when they had it on they were these kind of majestic figures.

But Simmons had a really weird thing where he wouldn't use words.

He just he had this spiky kind of tortoise shell with all these points on it, and he would kind of push you against the wall a little bit too hard.

And I remember the spikes digging into the back of my hand.

And I just remember thinking it was on the border of being

a lot of women, particularly women younger than me, wouldn't tolerate that.

No.

But I just thought, oh, that's great coffee.

I always just thought it's great coffee.

You've been assaulted by a

space, what did you call it?

A space clown.

A space clown.

Yeah.

Very touchy-feely.

But I was never alone in a hotel room being given things by them.

And I think that they were so careful by that point.

So,

on the whole, there's how many?

There's 19 pieces, I think, in the book.

And more than that number of people that you've actually interviewed in those pieces.

Before I ask you about the people who you liked most, who were some of the people you met that you were surprised by?

Maybe people who you felt like, oh, this is pretty hard work.

Yeah, let me think.

Well, Ray Davis is hard work.

Yeah.

But

I found it a great kind of hard work.

He asked me 16 questions in the course of the interview.

He kind of flipped it round.

He has this kind of, I think he's described it before as a sort of eternal sense of apartness.

He doesn't feel like an old rock star, even though he sort of talks like his songs are kind of the building blocks of culture because he was always so kind of miserable and chippy and sort of floated above everything and observed things that he's kind of funny in an interview too.

He's sort of slightly ghostly.

And he would say, so you just suddenly come out with questions like,

is that guy from Depeche Mode gay?

You know, or did your mother work?

And it was quite disarming in a funny kind of way because you sort of got sucked into what felt like a bit of a back and forth.

And then at the end, he, I was looking down at my drink or something and he said, I suddenly caught sight of you in 50 years' time.

And I thought, what does that mean?

What does that mean?

What does that mean?

Like, do I look like an old woman, or is he kind of being wistfully romantic?

Because he talks about different eras as being to him, the 50s were black and white, the 60s were technicolor.

He's quite photographic in the way that he uses imagery.

And so he was hard.

I didn't feel that he liked me.

I didn't feel the twinkliness with him.

Well, the chapter is is called, You Haven't Asked Me Any Questions Yet or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so that was sort of slightly like, oh, God, this is failing.

But at the same time, I came away thinking that I'd got enough of a strangeness about him for it to work.

Yeah, I mean, he's super complex, though.

He's had some tough struggles, hasn't he?

Mentally, I think.

Very much so.

He's been through a lot of depression and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Horrible sort of

repercussions from his sister's death when he was a teenager and how he sort of self-harmed when he was 12 or 13 and stuff.

And I think it all builds up to this.

It's hard to be kind of that comical about Ray Davis in a way because there is such a psychological apartness and complexity to it.

And he was so, so important at sort of standing outside the 60s in a way that he wasn't saying they were all great, you know, that he's actually kind of almost a cynical view.

Oh, yeah, very of everything, yeah.

Dedicated follower of fashion is a total takedown.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

The songs about the movement were not of the movement.

They were sort of hovering above.

And I've often thought that about the 60s.

I kind of, I don't, I don't wish I'd lived in the 60s because I would have hated the pretension.

Yeah.

I hated the pretension of the 90s, you know.

Right.

So that was.

Exactly right.

Yeah.

I think I would have been a total conservative Belle End.

Do you think so?

Yeah.

Big star.

Yeah.

The idea that everything was, that fashion was so restricted, that, you know, girls had to wear mini skirts regardless of what they looked like in them and they ironed their hair and everybody was like this sense of the pose of it all.

I don't, I've never lustered after that time.

I lust more after the 70s for some reason but I'm sure that was just as bad.

In the introduction of the book you mention your impressions of the 90s when you were in your teens, right?

Yeah.

And you talk about 90s irony.

Can I get you to read the paragraph?

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

I actually have it here if it's useful.

At the top there.

Yeah.

No one lucky enough to have come of age in a different decade can truly understand 1990s irony and just how caustic it was.

It is a taste, a smell that cannot be picked up in historical revision of the decade and has been largely erased from social history.

An entire way of living that might be summed up in the face of Marc Lamar.

In the 90s, the level of irony in conversation among the young was exhausting.

This was not communication.

It was an exchange of taut, self-fettered opinion predicated on the understanding that one was not to express genuine enthusiasm about anything, even if one clearly loved it.

I don't know if that's familiar to you, but that was my overriding feeling of that decade.

And it was a decade when I was trying to kind of come into myself, you know.

Yeah,

it is familiar.

I mean, you sum it up really brilliantly.

And much as Mark Lamar is a well-loved and respected figure in the comedy world, I certainly had that

relationship with him as a celebrity figure.

I, you know, I kind of hated the word.

Never mind the Buzzcocks, he was so mean on.

I was on Nevermind the Buzzcocks, and he taught me a new one.

And he was just scrupulously charmless on that show, and he just thought I was a prick.

But I don't think the TV audience liked what he was doing.

I mean, I didn't, as a viewer, I didn't

like that atmosphere in those shows, that kind of gladiatorial atmosphere.

But he's a funny one, though, Mark Lamar, just to while we're on the subject, because he did a great music show.

Did you ever watch that?

Like,

it was a really good

I can't remember what it was called.

It was short-lived.

Yeah.

But it was like a kind of a cultural round-up thing, a little bit like the late show or something.

Maybe he became pushed into a certain role, but I think there was so much of that going on in that in that decade anyway.

And the way it's sort of looked back on is the Laddette culture, Cool Britannia, that it was all very kind of gung-ho and vindaloo, vindaloo.

But I think they're missing something else, which was certainly uh you can see it on the old top of the pops friday night things this sneering inability to like

stand up for anything you cared about everything was ironic and and the dominant musical culture in retrospect was so kind of brash and and bold but everybody to me in the britpop bands seemed to be so kind of over it and i i i really i suppose i envied people who could really get behind those bands and feel that they were part of that tribe and feel that damon was speaking to them.

Because to me, I just found it like scary and repellent.

It was very weird.

A lot of those Britpop bands felt co-opted against their will.

Yeah.

And they all, like, none of them said, oh, yeah, Britpop, it's great.

I'm so proud to be able to

remember.

They were all like, oh, Britpop, it's shit.

I'm not Britpop.

Exactly.

They were being forced into something against their will.

So, what were you into in those days?

Was that your Queen days?

I was just into Queen, and

I don't say this with great pride, but I lost about seven years of my life to Queen.

I mean, there's worse things to

there's a lot to get into there, lots of albums.

It's pretty great.

I mean, I absolutely loved Queen.

I didn't sort of stick with it, and I didn't get into the albums, but I got the greatest hits very early on.

There's a lot of hits.

Presumably, you owned the records back in the day, though.

I owned the tapes.

Ah, yeah, I was a tape person as well.

Yeah, greatest hits one and two.

I'm trying to do the Dolby noise.

Tapes, yeah, of course.

Why would you have anything else?

Tapes.

But much, much harder to fast forward through the awkward songs when you're trying to not let your dad hear because you don't think he'll like this one.

I think that actually the cassette format encouraged a deeper commitment to whatever you were listening because it was a pain in the ass to fast forward.

It was a pain in the ass and there was also a risk of breaking

after repeated use.

So yeah, you did just have to tolerate it and maybe think about something else during Radio Gaga.

Did you do repair jobs on your broken cassettes?

I think we did.

I think we did, but then we also went to a lot of car boot sales in North Norfolk in the 90s, and we would be able to replace them quite easily as well.

So, yeah, there was a lot of, I mean, it says a lot about Queen at the time.

There were lots of tapes from Queen in car boot sales at that point.

It was like

a secret obsession.

Nobody talked about it.

But over time, it's come out of the woodwork.

There are a lot of people, exactly, of my generation who were obsessed with that band, but in a secret way.

Yes, you must have seen Rhys Thomas's brilliant

documentary about him.

Yeah.

I used to bump into Rhys in the olden 90s.

Actually, no, it was after that, it was early 2000s because he's a bit younger.

But it's so good that thing that he put together, and evidently, he got access, incredible access to their archive.

He did, and I think that started their big revival.

I mean, obviously, when they started the Ben Elton musical, that was when they were back in the West End, but it was really part of the story that led up to that terrible Bohemian Rhapsody film and people suddenly saying that they're national treasures and that they're wonderful and Roger Taylor turning up on Jules Holland which I mean that just would never have happened.

It's kind of amazing to me.

Why didn't you like the film?

I didn't think the film was so bad.

Oh, I think it was just I couldn't watch anyone play them.

Okay.

And but I had other objections to it.

Like I couldn't believe some of the creative tweaking they'd done with the storyline, like the idea that Freddie had to like beg for his job back just before Live Aid because he'd sort of disgraced himself with his wild lifestyle.

I mean that never happened and I I thought, this is your beloved bandmate and you're the executive producers.

Why are you writing this guy?

Like this lonely kind of party animal who's desperate to get back in the band.

He never left the band.

Unless, you know, there's something I don't know, but I thought it was very odd to do that.

Yeah.

Kind of power play, you know.

You never met Freddie, no, he died.

No, and I don't know anybody who did

in my music journalism world.

And that's fascinating to me because they met everybody.

But that says a lot about that band and how they protected themselves.

So Dave Hepworth and Mark Ellen never met him.

These are your ex-Word colleagues.

My ex-colleagues at Word, yeah, and they met everyone.

I mean, they did live aid, you know.

I mean, maybe they were in a room with him, but there weren't interviews.

And you haven't met other journalists who interviewed him?

No, I don't.

I think maybe David Quantic did

years ago.

But every time Queen did an interview, they brought up the fact they played Sun City in South Africa.

In South Africa.

During the boycott.

Yeah, yeah.

And so that would be like a kind of moment of tension in the interview.

And then basically, I think Freddie handed over most of the interviewing to Brian and Roger.

And did he never have a good response to that?

Did he never stand up for himself or try and explain what the decision was?

Or was it just that they knew basically they shouldn't have done it?

I think they say now that they regret it, but at the time they used to say, well, Elton John and Rod Stewart did it as well, and no one's asking them about it.

So there was a lot of them that played at a similar time, but for various reasons, I don't know, maybe the attitude of Queen, maybe it just looked very arrogant and, I mean, very apolitical.

They always claimed to be very apolitical.

I loved the description of you in the car with your parents and saying that for literally seven years, the only thing they were allowed to listen to in the car was Queen if you were there.

Yeah, really not an exaggeration.

I mean, we were living in rural Norfolk, so there was a lot of the car.

The nearest shop was five miles away.

School was 20 miles away, although that was a bus.

And every time we got in the car, even if it was like 10 past six on a winter's morning, this tape would go in, and I'd be trying to essentially do PR for the band because they weren't my parents' cup of tea.

My parents were into, you know, John McLaughlin and Jeff Beck and things like that.

And

it was honestly a campaign for seven years, and now they hold them in huge affection.

But I don't know what was going on psychologically there with trying to make your parents love the thing that you loved, which is so much at odds with what you usually hear about what teenagers are trying to do.

But I have spoken to people for who they had a similar thing.

You do want your parents to love the thing that you love.

You're not trying to necessarily rebel with your music.

And that's kind of a,

I don't know what it is psychologically.

Yeah, I had exactly the same thing.

Me too.

Yeah.

And I never wanted to be one of those children who told their parents to fuck off.

I found it really upsetting when I saw it in films and TV.

Me too.

And because that was my worst nightmare, was to fall out with my parents like that.

And I also just absolutely loved them.

I just thought they were great.

You know, there were problems there.

Yeah.

But.

So did you ever fall out with them?

Not properly.

No.

I mean,

you know, I guess because we were never close enough to fall out is the sad truth.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Yeah.

And,

but I really...

related to that feeling of wanting them to like the things that I liked.

And I had that with Bowie and my mum indulged that and she was really sweet about it and she said oh yes he's very good yes oh I like major tongue she said major tongue that's very good that one

would she sit and listen with you all yeah yeah and she you know and I was confident enough that she was going to be supportive and interested that I played her a song called All the Mad Men, which is a pretty long, pretty dense,

froggy Bowie song from the man who sold the world.

And she's like, that's very interesting.

That's very interesting.

Yeah.

And I was just like, yes, mum loves David.

The payoff was that we ended up watching the man who fell to earth together.

I was pretty uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Watching Rip Torn having

energetic sex with a young student with my mum.

How old were you then?

I must have been about 10 or 11 or something.

So I thought I was like, oh, it's mum, it's a sci-fi film.

David Bowie's in a sci-fi film.

I was thinking Star Wars with David Bowie.

So you went to cinema, did you?

No, we didn't.

No, no, no, no.

It was on TV.

I think it was the first time that it had been shown on British TV on BBC.

And so it was particularly your mum that would watch this stuff with you?

Yes, yes.

No, there's no way my dad was going to.

It was like clear from day one.

My dad made it very clear.

He thought everything I was into was dog shit.

Really?

Yeah.

You know, even Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher, who my dad was a big fan of, and wrote a big, long, eviscerating piece about how terrible pop music was, the tyranny of pop, saying it was all dog shit.

But even in that piece, he says, apart from Metallica,

because his son was into Metallica.

So even Roger Screw.

Roger Screw.

Yeah, his son had got metallic.

He was like, well, Metallica.

I saw some Metallica glasphemy and I thought, yes, okay, there is some merit to it.

Wow, yes.

But my dad never had that.

So was your mum compensating in some level?

Do you think that's a matter of money?

No, no, she was genuinely, she was a lot younger than he was.

So she, you know, she loved the Beatles.

She grew up loving them.

And she liked pop music.

And, yeah, we used to listen to Radio 1 together in the car and she was into ghost town by the special she thought oh yeah this is brilliant and she even liked uh Einsteiner go-go by landscape

and uh I was like yeah okay mum's into landscape a message in a bottle I remember

and when we listened to that the police and she was like oh this is brilliant do you remember the feeling in your body when they like something it's so it's like I don't know what can't describe it it's like an adrenaline bolt it really was and you get almost overly excited, and then there's a kind of crash because you realize that sometimes they're just being nice about some music.

It wasn't necessarily that it had gone deep into their soul, or maybe they'd forgotten the song the next time you played it to them.

And you thought, did that moment mean nothing to you?

Yeah, I don't, you know, the only crash I had with mum, because I don't think she ever sugarcoated, well, maybe she did.

I was just so far gone.

I was like, mum's into Width of a Circle by David Burry.

But

I then played her, I then got into Thomas Dolby through Joe Cornish, who got me into the album The Flat Earth.

Yeah.

I love that album.

Oh my God.

And there was the title track on there.

I just listened to it every night for a couple of years or something when I was in my teens.

Around O-level times.

It was my balm

when I was stressed out.

And I played it to my mum and she was like...

It's a bit wet, isn't it?

Oh, wet.

That's harsh.

Yes, that's not what you want.

You want something more dismissive rather than something actually critical.

You don't want a specific kind of negation.

Wet.

A bit wet.

I don't give my mum enough credit for music because my dad was the one that we all think of as being musical.

My mum actually brought a lot of the records into the house.

So she went out and bought Graceland.

She bought Blue because my dad wouldn't bother.

But when we were in the car, sitting in the back, you know, I would have lined up something to play them.

And sometimes my mum would talk over the very best bit of the song.

And I remember like sometimes like pushing my fingernails into my palms with frustration because mum had like spoiled this song I was trying to present to dad and it must be something to do with like trying to present your innermost self really to your parents and wanting you were talking about not necessarily knowing one another well enough to have fights and I think there is this awkwardness, isn't there, in families and music can be a way of trying to connect almost like romantically with other family members.

And that's why when it fails it feels so bad because it's so exposing it's like this is what i love i may not be able to say i love you but i love this song and you know it's very vivid to me i love the idea of you making noises to cover up a fluffed note from freddie in a live recording well he sang sharp not many people sang sharp i think A lot of people sang flat, like Sinatra.

Sharp's like better on the ear than flat, but you could still notice sometimes in live performances he would go like slightly above the note and I'd go

like that.

Because of course I imagined that my dad was listening so carefully that he would notice the sharp.

Has he just gone sharp?

He wasn't listening.

I think he blocked it out because if it's seven years of this, you block it out, don't you?

I never got any real feedback at all, apart from he did admire Brian May, so he's a guitarist and you couldn't not admire Brian May if you're a guitarist.

So I suppose that was one of my bit of ammunition, but of course I just wanted them to like Roger Taylor.

What was going on in your head with Roger Taylor?

That was pure.

Lust.

I was very lustful of Roger Taylor, but it's weird because I was 13, I suppose, and I liked Roger Taylor at the age he was when I discovered him.

So I liked him in his mid-40s.

So if you think about the me-too-ness of that, the distance of age.

He's a good-looking 40-year-old.

He was really good-looking until about 50, I think.

And then it changed a little bit, but he had a good goatee at 50.

Little glasses, like tight jeans, cowboy boots, goatee.

I quite liked all that.

So it was weird because I wasn't looking back at pictures of him when he was like 25.

It was as he was then when we went to see him play the Cambridge Corn Exchange with my parents.

And that was him playing a solo show.

Yeah, he's had a very prolific solo career.

And were you genuinely into those solo albums?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Yes, and they were patchy, but I put a lot of energy into them.

Including into the patchy songs.

And then you met him properly.

I mean, you met him after that Corn Exchange show, right?

No, I met him years later.

So we actually started going on holiday to where we knew he lived.

There was an entire programme made about this, unfortunately.

He has a house in Cornwall, and I just managed to persuade my parents to rent a holiday cottage.

And did they understand why?

They just did it.

So that was kind of, you know, showing love, really, wasn't it?

But did they know that it was because

they knew.

And we had to do a lot of hanging around outside the house, which had a big wall outside it, so we never saw anything.

And then one day we did actually see him walking down Lemmon Street in Truro and followed him into the cinema and bought tickets for Godzilla and sat behind him for the entire film and then got an autograph.

So it definitely started to get the thing out of my system when I'd...

I'd actually met him.

Was that a good day, though, when you got his autograph?

Or did you sort of...

Yeah, that was good.

Yeah, it was like I'd come of age.

It was just before...

It was the end end of my A-levels.

I was due to go to university, and I felt like something lifted because our lives had, for a moment, intersected, and it felt like there was a future without him in it.

It's hard to say.

Yeah, it was good.

It was like growing up or something.

I think when you go into the orbit of the person for a minute, it takes away some of the force field of like worship and pain that goes behind those musical obsessions, you know.

Wow.

And then, how old were you then when you sat down for the profiles that you wrote that are in the book?

So, when I met him for the interview, it was 2011, so a long time later, but I still found all the old feelings were kind of there.

Yeah, he's the only person who

I sort of run out of questions around because he doesn't like journalists very much, and he answers very concisely.

And then I found myself looking at the clock, and I still had 20 minutes with him.

I didn't know what else to say.

And I ended up at one point, I was like, So,

what are your hobbies?

I was like, I don't know, I like books.

And I was like, I can't believe that this, I was supposed to be this good rock interviewer and I have nothing to say to this person

because of my past.

How did you feel afterwards then?

Was that a weird...

I think it was nice to write about them

in that way where you could kind of straddle your...

your teenage life and your present.

I wish.

Never.

But I still, yeah, I still did kind of like quite fancy him when I met him.

It's weird.

I think I always would, you know.

Yeah.

Is that real Melody?

Have you seen my phone charger?

I left it right there.

Did you see it?

Have you got it?

Where's my charger gone?

Woof, boop.

Where's my phone charger?

The battery is about to die.

It was on the table.

Woof, woof, woof.

Round and round in their heads go the chord progressions, the empty lyrics, and the impoverished fragments of tune.

And boom goes the brain box

at the start of every bar.

At the start of every bar.

Boom goes the brain box.

What was your other big viral piece?

The man who inspired Joni Mitchell's Cary.

Right.

That was a different one.

That's the end of the book, really, because it felt it's a very recent piece just after the pandemic, and it felt like maybe the end of something for me, in a funny way.

It's not a rock star, it's a man who was trapped in a song at the age of 23 and has spent his whole life

either trying to milk it or saying, don't talk to me about that bloody song, please, you know, because she wrote it when they shared a cave together in Metella.

Metella is the island in Greece.

In Greece, yeah.

And she just released Ladies of the Canyon and she was just about to start writing blue.

and she lived with him in the summer between.

The amazing thing is, I think she went to Greece right in the middle of the press period for Ladies of the Canyon.

It shows how different things she wasn't required to be around for any interviews or something.

So this is...

What year was this?

71.

Okay.

Yeah, and or 70 or 71.

So she was already getting pretty well.

She was just on the rise.

Yeah.

And people followed her around on the island.

She always had an entourage.

And he was a very

rough, misanthropic kind of posh guy from South Carolina who I think probably did a lot of drugs at that point and he was a bit like a bodyguard as well as a boyfriend and people stayed clear of them.

He cooked in the mermaid cafe and he's in two songs because he's in California as well.

The redneck who stole the camera gave me back my smile but he kept my camera to sell.

That was Cary.

And I'd been trying to get him for years and he said he was writing a memoir and then I wrote a piece on blue and then he got in touch and said okay do you want to do the interview now and I met him in Paris but that was so much fun that piece because it was really weird telling somebody's story that had never been told you know yeah and he was forthcoming he was really forthcoming and he was poetic and quite narcissistic in a in a great way a character and he looked like a kind of an old pirate or something and he again he just knew how to for someone who hadn't really done any interviews his quotes were perfect.

They just kind of rolled out of him quite economical in a funny way.

And it felt to me, yeah, like I was kind of almost

looking at projection more about

what we feel this man might have been in this song and what he actually is.

And it sort of took it just changed things a little bit for me in a funny way.

Because he did get swallowed up by it, didn't he?

He allowed himself to,

well, he followed her back to the US.

She invited him back yeah to California the story went way beyond the song that they did actually try to make things work but he was living with her in Laurel Canyon at a period when she was recording with Crosby Stilson Nash and James Taylor and he just was complete fish out of water yeah he said it people would come round to look at the gorilla she'd brought home from the zoo he felt like a

a very rough kind of figure which is funny because he was from a posh like antebellum family but it was it was so much fun to do it in so much depth and yeah you know even talk to the person who made her dulcima that she was playing in that period.

But I had no desire to talk to Joni Mitchell because it's like this is telling the other story.

I couldn't have got Joni Mitchell anyway.

Have you not met her?

No, I don't think I might be able to get her through Cary if I really, really tried, but it's so unlikely.

She's so sort of protected and

probably have to interview Brandy Carlyle instead.

I haven't got much to say to Brandi Carlyle.

Who would be the women of music that you would would love to speak to most?

Joni.

Now I'm going to my brain spanning.

I mean,

on my wish list from day one has been Bjork.

Yeah.

Even though I think that becomes less and less likely with every year that passes, it seems like she's just...

I haven't heard anyone interviewing her in depth for years and years.

Yeah.

But it's such a shame because...

I watched this South Bank profile again the other day that I think was towards the end of the eighties maybe and it's so good and she's just

brilliant and everything she says is fascinating and the way she says it and

everything's fresh isn't it with some people.

Yeah, but she's that very rare thing of being someone who is so talented and so original but she actually is able to describe what she does in a really interesting way and articulate some of what makes her music so extraordinary.

Yeah, so she's got a an artist's brain.

Yeah.

So she thinks constantly outside the box, but she can actually explain in almost a nerdy way why she's doing things.

I loved the piece about Kevin Ayres.

Yeah.

And I remember reading that in the word after you'd written it.

When was that?

That was like...

2008, very early.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, so that's right at the beginning of your video.

It was written because the first feature I wrote.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Thrown in somewhat at the deep end.

Yeah.

Were you a fan of his?

I'd never heard of him.

Okay.

I got into him through a a band called Gorky's Zygotic Monkey.

Yeah.

And they wrote a song called Kevin Ayers.

I was like, what?

Who's Kevin Ayres?

And so then I looked him up and I listened to some soft machine and I listened to the solo albums and there's a couple of those solo albums that are pretty good and one or two Kevin Ayers songs that are some of my favourite songs ever.

Shouting from a Bucket Blues.

And I was interested to know more about him and I didn't really have much of a sense of what he was like.

So did you, how much of his music did you listen to before you went out?

I did it.

I listened to a lot of it before he went and I kind of got up to speed with him but I'd been given it the assignment by Mark Ellen because a little bit like we were talking earlier about these invisible dynamics in an interview, they thought for whatever reason, it might be good to get a young woman to go over and interview this famous rock crumpeteer.

Right, okay.

Which again now sounds dodgy, doesn't it?

It does.

It sounds like they're exploiting your youth and beauty to basically be preyed upon by this old rue.

But then he was so vulnerable that what I found was not like the image that had been painted in the word office.

They thought he was

exactly an old rue knocking back the claret,

living the life of Riley in the south of France away from everything and living on PRS checks and things.

And he lived in,

I would say, close to poverty alone.

And he was a chronic alcoholic, and he was carrying a blue plastic bag that he called his, like, what did he call it?

My sweetie bag or something like that.

And it was just full of prescription painkillers and things.

And it was a very, very sad experience because he responded well to me.

I liked him.

I felt very shocked by not only by the condition he was in, but by the knowledge that I was going to have to

burst some of the bubble of what this kind of great old rock rueway was actually like.

Like I couldn't go home and pretend that he was having a great time.

He drank neat pints of Pernow.

He drove me down a mountainside after two bottles of wine and I remember just thinking that I wish my mum was here to stop me getting in this car but I've got to get in this car because I've got to get this piece, you know.

But when we did actually speak it was very intimate, very confessional and again beautifully economical.

Like he talked about conning on the streets of London, like basically promising sexual favours and then running off before he actually had to do them.

When he was young and beautiful.

When he was a child.

So, yeah, so he, I think he was at boarding schools, expelled from some father, was a BBC producer, very comfortable.

It's sort of upper-middle-class.

Really upper, sad, like upper-middle-class story of

his voice, he's quite sort of well-shaped.

Very clummy, yeah, yeah.

That's awful.

I didn't know that about

so sort of real dislocation from his family, and his relationship with the members of Soft Machine at school was the first intimacy he'd ever had, he put it that way.

And he really just said, look, I've always wanted to do as little as possible.

I've never considered any other profession other than music because the smart people are the people who don't do anything.

And then you looked at sort of what doing nothing was.

He'd pulled out of a tour, basically hospitalised himself with painkillers.

on the verge of a European tour.

He was not in a state where you could do a comeback for Kevin Ayres, but they were trying to make one.

So there was a manager there who was trying to get him back on the scene and he wasn't really up to it.

So it was really, it was a very sad experience, but kind of wonderful in some ways.

Seemed to go on for a very long time.

How long were you out there?

I felt like it was a week.

It might have been three days or so.

He got very attached to me and he assumed that I was going to stay with him at his house.

Which, again, in this day and age sounds a bit dodgy but at the time it just felt kind of sad that he he showed me in the into this little room with this little single bed in it and said this is where you're sleeping I'll make up I'll make this bed up for you and I had to explain to his manager that I wasn't you know what he wanted and then there was this really honestly a really strange moment where I was standing on the cobble streets of Carcassonne and the manager went into his house and I heard him saying, it's not 1967, Kevin, you can't do this.

And then there was this like bashing of pots and pans.

And then the manager came out and said, Don't worry, you're staying at your hotel as planned.

But he'd sort of assumed at the end of our exchange over several days that there would be some reciprocal event

or a closeness.

It was sadder than it sounds.

It wasn't leery or that comes across in the piece, yeah.

Yeah.

He doesn't want to grab me.

He wouldn't have laid a finger on me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just a sort of delusional, sad

impulse to get sexy.

Yeah, yeah, and a better era when that's what happened

with journalists.

And it was cool, and it wasn't a problem, and everyone was fine.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you had a connection, that's how it was expressed.

I mean, it's lovely when you meet people.

Carrie was a bit like that too.

You meet people who definitely live still in another era in terms of human relationships.

And it's very, very, very bohemian.

I think he met his

mother of his daughter, Galen.

He kind of stole from Richard Branson after a key party.

This is Kevin Ayres.

Galen Ayres is Kevin Ayres' grown-up daughter.

And her mum, Christine Tomasi, was Richard Branson's wife, and Kevin Ayers tempted her away.

Literally after a key party, so it's all very like, whoa,

shared, shared love, things like that.

But it was hard for me to.

The piece flowed very much.

I remember writing really fast, but I was crying on the way home on the plane because I was just like, oh God, is this what journalism is?

If you find someone in a state, you have to say.

But actually, I think maybe some people wouldn't have said.

You look back over old rock profiles in the 80s on Rock's Back pages and stuff, and you get hints of bad things, but they're sort of like, still the dominant story of this person's a hero kind of overrides that.

And maybe people don't want to see what they don't want to see.

Maybe a male journalist might have thought more that this was someone living the life of Riley, I don't know, but I'm not sure.

Did you get any feedback from him or his daughter?

Never, no, no.

I spoke to his daughter years later actually because she produced a photo book and she was a remarkable person.

She's a musician and she was just very, she'd obviously done a lot of thinking about her relationship with this man because she'd become his kind of estate manager and his carer towards the end of his life.

And she told me on the phone that she used to think if I turn my back, he'll go and die, just to prove a point.

And he did.

So she, I think she didn't talk to him for a couple of weeks, and that's when he passed away in Carcasson.

So she was left with the unpaid tax bills, the legacy, the music, and everything, and has been trying to figure her way through that ever since.

But she sort of talked about him as being like a father, a god, and a brother, and a best friend, which really resonated with me with those figures of these kind of cosmic fathers that you get in music of the archetype, I suppose.

I don't know.

So, what about your literal father?

Is he still with us?

Yeah, he is, yeah, yeah.

So, he's 71 in May, and he was an amateur.

Well, when my mum met him, he was playing jazz guitar professionally in a little jazz club in Anik in Northumberland.

Is your mother a musician as well?

My mother's not, no, but she is musical, like she can hold a tune.

But my dad's always been a sort of extremely extremely emotional about music.

When he listens to music, he often cries.

And then when he's talking about music, he gets a huge lump in his throat and can't.

It's really weird.

Are you not like that?

I am.

Yeah, I am.

I think I've got that.

And it's sort of seeing that repressed emotion, but how it's kind of so much on the surface through music with him.

He can cry over Tina Arena's song.

Sure, I've got

Sorrento Moon

or Rhapsody in Blue or something by Dawn Upshaw.

It's sort of the centre of his emotional life, really.

And I suppose it's always been mine as well.

And he's very reserved.

His parents were sort of Methodist, Plymouth Brethren, all that kind of thing.

And so he doesn't express emotion that openly, but he is very emotional.

So it's my way of communicating with him.

The connection has been between me and my dad

my whole life, but I'm not sure how much it is really

there or it's in my head, if you get what I mean.

My dad will read this book, but he might be just very surprised that all this stuff goes on in my brain with regard to him and music.

There is a lot, I think, that goes on in, we've been talking about children's relationship with wanting their parents to like the songs that they like, and there's a lot of projection that goes on there, isn't there?

There's a lot of emotion and

unfulfilled unspoken feelings.

And I noticed this very odd thing while writing the book.

I went up to Hampstead Heath and I was listening to a Glenn Campbell gospel album, which I often listen up there.

He was just out of the house.

What's the name of the gospel album?

It's called Show Me Your Way.

Show me your way, O Lord, and I will give myself to thee.

It's one of Glenn's best albums.

It's from about 1990, and he'd been born again and sort of baptised in a freezing creek in Arkansas.

He was like top of his game again, you know, clean, not drinking whiskey anymore.

And he did some really good gospel songs.

And I was listening to them up on the heath.

And I suddenly realised that my whole life, I've been listening to music through my dad's ears.

It's really creepy.

So if there's a song that I like, I put it on, and then suddenly I'm out of my head, and I'm into an imagined dad's head going, dad will like this introduction, dad will like this chord change.

And then I get kind of a double hit because I'm imagining playing it to him.

And a lot of this stuff I will never play to him.

So this is what I mean, that it's sort of internal.

It's not really about him or the other person at all.

And I sort of think of it as like a quadraphonic listening that there's always an imaginary audience and I'll skip back to the beginning of a song and start it again to get the same kind of thrill of like,

I suppose, being 12 again and going to the dentist and pressing play and hoping that he likes it.

Very weird.

But maybe other people have the same thing or maybe it's just me.

Why do you think that happens though?

Was there a closeness that was not there in your relationship that you're trying to access via music?

I think maybe a verbal expression of closeness, but the closeness is there, but it's

unspoken.

If I say I love you,

he gets quite choked up and

he says it back, but I've only said it in recent years.

But he was also, my mum went back to work when I was about two weeks old, but she was self-employed.

So she was coming home all the time to breastfeed me and things like that.

But my dad was a a house husband in the days when it was quite unusual.

And he wrote a piece for parenting magazine called My Life as a House Husband when he was like, you know, he was about 24 when I was born or something.

And so he was my, he was sort of mummy in a simple nursery caring type way, slightly more than my mum because she was there less.

So he I kind of imprinted onto him as as mum, I suppose.

So there is quite a lot of you know, woo feeling bound up, but he's also a reserved person who doesn't go around verbally expressing it.

So,

well, of course, I've discovered all of this in the last few months.

I've just taken it for granted my whole life, really.

Yeah.

Well, there's a chapter called Dads, Girls, and Frustrated Musicians, which is mainly about meeting Jeff Beck.

And

you say,

for me, sharing Jeff was about something else, too.

As the recent discovery of my bizarre, imaginary, quadraphonic listening habits suggested, I will always need my father to love any music I think is my own.

I thought that was a lovely thing for a daughter to say about their father.

I thought if my daughter ever expressed a similar sentiment, it would break my heart in the best way.

Yeah.

But then you've felt that own that feeling yourself with your own parents, haven't you?

Yes.

It's interesting that you can't, you almost, not that you can't imagine your daughter saying that, but it would be so wonderful.

Whereas actually, it's a familiar thing to you.

You kind of know that.

I know,

I understand it, but I can't imagine them actually saying it.

So your dad hasn't read the book yet?

No.

I think that would be an amazing thing to read.

Yeah, I think he...

Poor dad.

It might be familiar to him, but it won't be something he's necessarily processed consciously.

It's just he knows how neurotic I used to be about the stuff I liked and how much I wanted his...

his approval of certain tracks.

And so I think he'll probably be aware of all this, but it is a strange thing to put into words.

because I think when you think about musical potential, it's so innate.

It's in all humans, and we all know what it's like to have a fantasy of being able to play an instrument or be in a band, or the kind of dreams you might have growing up about being in a rock band or something.

I think it is about more than music, it's something about unleashed creative potential, which is why we do get so

neurotically gripped by it.

I don't know.

And yet, some people don't really give a shit about music.

I know, I was thinking this the other day.

Some people just aren't interested in music.

Or at least, you know, it's fine, but I'm like, I'm not going to lose my mind over it.

Yeah, how is that possible?

I know.

I can't work it out.

But now, as well, as a 55-year-old man, I feel so disconnected from what's going on in the world musically anyway.

It means something totally different.

Yeah.

It seems in the world.

Yes, yeah.

You have to have your own, don't you?

And I feel the same.

I don't get emotionally affected, particularly by new stuff I hear.

But occasionally, you'll still get caught by

even something as simple as a bit of mechanics a chord change or a modulation or something that will make your hair stand on end and then you will think oh yes it's still in me it's like um I think Jung described it as a direct line to the soul and he was envious of musicians being able to like access like a you know people talk about the flow state and everything don't they you see jazz musicians playing and you just think god i'd love to be able to do that because every night if they have a gig every night they get to go to a higher plane as part of their job and then they come down from it again and I don't get that in my daily life writing doesn't give me the same

it gives me a bit of the same but it's it's more like workmanlike and tiring and solitary but yeah I think if I could be anything I would have been like a jazz piano player in a jazz rock group or something and then have you tried to write any songs never really I think they would turn out like everything else.

I just don't think I could do that.

It's weird.

Maybe it is possible, but...

I mean, you definitely could.

You know how to write melodies, so I'm sure that you can...

I'm sure that the guitar is kind of all part of it, isn't it?

I'm sure you can.

Well, I don't know if I do know how to write melodies.

But,

you know,

I don't think I'll ever write a good song, really.

What is your...

But it's still nice to do.

It's fun.

That's the thing, isn't it?

It's about whether you let go of the idea of actually being good.

Yeah, and that is hard.

It is hard.

It is hard.

Because obviously it would be so much better if you were.

I think when you've been like academic and then you've gone into a writing career and everything has to be like to a certain standard, there's just some really arrogant part of me that can't bear the idea of just being

slightly okay on an instrument because it doesn't, oh God, you know, there's no point starting if you're not going to be up to scratch on it, but it's just not going to work, is it?

Yeah.

What's your kind of musical fantasy then?

What would you do if you could?

My musical fantasy is duetting with more or less any musician

and being quite good.

And you know, I've tried to play out the fantasy on numerous occasions in public, and I don't think it's ever gone well.

And I had a recent one that I haven't really spoken about.

But

after I interviewed Kim Deal

of Breeders and Pixie's fame

she said she asked if I would interview her live as part of the promotion for her new album and so I did this event at the Rio Cinema

and because we'd been noodling around playing King of the Road, which was like the first song she ever learned how to play on the guitar by Roger Miller.

And I'd been learning how to play it too.

So I had this fantasy that she and I would duet on King of the Road and we'd do the harmonies

and it would be great and I'd play the guitar and and I sort of tried to do it a little bit in the actual podcast but it didn't I couldn't actually play the guitar properly.

Yeah.

You know, it didn't quite happen.

But then she said afterwards, she was like, well, when we do this interview at the Rio, let's do King of the Road.

Oh.

I was like, yes.

Yes.

I've been waiting all my life for someone to say that, like one of my favorite musicians to say, let's do a duet.

Okay.

Anyway, long story short, short, you know, I spent every minute of the next week practicing King of the Road.

I said, like, are you okay to meet up like a couple of hours before and we can just run through it, make sure?

And she's, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, on the day she got delayed, and

we didn't get any rehearsal time at all, and so we shouldn't have done it.

So you did do it, so we did do it, amazing, and it wasn't amazing.

How bad was it?

It was a total car crash.

Did it stop?

Or did you manage to stop it?

It didn't start for about, it took about three goes to start because I started with the doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo.

So in my mind, I was just going to do that, and then she was going to join in.

But instead, what she said was like, okay, everyone in the crowd, do the clicks.

So all the audience started clicking, like in the song.

Yeah.

Do do do do do is how it's supposed to start.

But the clicks put me off and it rattled me and I was like,

Because you were trying to keep in time with the clicks.

And I fumbled the riff.

And so I fumbled the riff twice.

And then eventually we were just like, oh, fuck it, let's just do it.

And then, and we got through it, but it was a total car crash.

It's nice that she just assumed that you're just like any professional musician could just like seamlessly slip into anything that she was.

You know, I did say to her, I was like, you understand that I can't actually play the guitar.

Like, I've learned how to play this song a bit, but I'm not a musician.

Yeah.

She's like, don't worry, it'll be fun.

She doesn't know what that means.

Yeah, because she's just saying everyone in her world can play the guitar a bit.

Exactly.

I was looking at the audience and I could see people with their phones out.

No, and it's going to go online straight away.

Oh, God.

You know, and usually you look at stuff online and you see something that someone's shot on their phone, and it'll be a beautiful moment in a QA or someone where you can really see, wow, that person is talented.

They can just do it on.

Because this would be Adam Buxton Botch's guitar with a good deal.

Oh, no.

Oh, man.

I had someone, a friend of mine, who

said, oh, I'm going to come along and see you chat to Kim Deal.

Let's hook up for a drink off.

Didn't hear from them again.

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Continue.

Come on.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck you.

Hey, welcome back, podcats.

You heard Kate Mossman talking to me and I'm very grateful indeed to Kate for making the time to waffle.

Got a few links in the description today related to some of what we spoke about.

Link to her book Men of a Certain Age of course, which I would recommend to anyone, but if you've got a kind of six music dad in your life,

I think that would make a pretty great present for any occasion.

There's a link to Kate reading the article she wrote about Carrie Raditz.

I Was Joni Mitchell's Carrie is the title of that interview from 2015.

Kate reads it very nicely.

Sadly she doesn't do an audiobook of men of a certain age.

I think that's a shame.

I would encourage her publishers to do one.

That sounded wrong.

I mean do an audiobook.

Basically there's a link in the description that takes you to my website where you'll find all these other links and videos and pictures of myself and Kate.

There's also links to Kate's article about Terence Trent Derby that I mentioned in the intro from 2015.

The curious afterlife of Terence Trent Derby.

That's the new statesman website.

I think they let you have one or two articles for free and then after that they ask you to subscribe if you're not already subscribed.

There is a free link to Kate's interview with Kevin Ayres, which was reprinted in The Guardian

originally in the Word magazine in 2008.

I've also put the video of Kevin Ayers playing shouting in a bucket blues on the old grey whistle test pretty good version of that song.

Sometimes I get too drunk I feel so goddamn low.

What else have you got link wise?

Well there's a link to the South Bank show about Bjork that I've already posted before in a previous episode, that documentary documentary from 1997,

which is really terrific,

uplifting,

fascinating.

Well I'll tell you the other picture I've got

if you click the links button in the description and scroll down to the bottom of the page on my blog you will see a picture of my alien cherry pie.

The one I made when I was practicing the weekend before I shot Bake Off.

I still haven't actually seen my episode of Bake Off.

Not particularly keen to watch it myself, but I didn't know if they'd included the picture of the original pie because I was so gutted when the pie didn't work out.

In case you don't know what I'm bollocking on about, I was on the Great British Bake Off a couple of weekends ago as I speak.

Shot it last summer in June.

and I made for my Showstopper challenge a cherry pie

with an alien, as in a baby alien xenomorph from the film Alien bursting out from the center, all made of pastry.

That was the idea, which I was very excited about.

And I spent a few days practicing

and I eventually made a version of it that was, I think, pretty good.

And there's a picture of that

on the web page.

For today's episode on my blog.

You know, I was gonna make it even better.

Like, I had to use those little silver cake balls, those horrible, horrible, crunchy silver cake balls.

I had some of those around, and I thought, well, I'll use those as a placeholder for the teeth, because the real alien has little, what look like little metal teeth in the original film.

So, I was gonna figure out that problem on the day.

As it worked out,

spoiler,

I didn't get that far.

I had other problems to deal with.

I don't know if it came across, but I was absolutely gutted

that I wasn't able to realize my vision

in the way that I had done when I was practicing.

Totally fine, I'm over it.

Yes, okay, I have written about it all in the introduction to my book as well, but

it's fine.

I've got it in perspective.

There's bigger problems in the world.

The sun has just come out out here.

Blue sky, the wind has died down.

Last night I went out in Norwich to the beautiful Playhouse Theatre

and I was the special guest for Kyle Smith Bino's improv night called Cool Story Bro with a K

because it's KSB you see like Kyle Smith Bino.

Luckily I was not doing any improvising that is my idea of pure hell.

I was just kind of MCing really and encouraging the Norwich audience to share some stories that Kayell and his troop could improvise around.

It was good fun.

Non-stop hilarity and brilliant comedic nimbleness from the cast.

Last night it was Graham Dixon, Lola Rose Maxwell, Emily Lloyd Caine, hope I'm pronouncing that right, and Robert Gilbert.

Now I googled Robert Gilbert just to check I'd got his name right

and I would suggest to him that he might need to change his name because especially if you Google Rob Gilbert comedian

forget about it.

The only hits you get are for the Welsh comedian Rod Gilbert.

Robert Gilbert is also an actor.

But still, I apologise Robert if you've had this conversation many thousands of times and you're tired of it, but

I wouldn't rule out a name rebrand, especially as he's a star in the making.

I mean, they all were.

I just really felt like, wow, these people are incredibly talented, all of them.

Graham, Lola Rose, Emily, and Robert, and of course, Kyle, who's brilliant.

I think I'd seen Lola Rose Maxwell on YouTube before doing stuff with Stevie Martin.

Very funny, but in real life,

on stage,

amazing, Amazing.

So funny, silly, generous, warm.

It was so good.

It was a great night.

And I would really recommend going along to one of those shows.

There's a link to the Cool Story Bro website where I think you'll find the tour dates.

It was great.

I'm going to say it was life-affirming.

Alright, deal with that.

Hello, bird.

Now, what kind of bird is that?

I've got to find out.

I'm so thick.

I'm going to do the chopomatic.

Oh, they've flown away.

Oh, Rosie, you're looking very beautiful there.

Let me get a snap.

Oh, yes.

Okay, I'll put that photo in along with the links today.

This is Rosie with her new haircut.

Now, what is that bird?

I'm going to see if I can describe it.

Small yellow and green-breasted bird, black and white head

I know you bird people out there are going to be slapping your foreheads at how obvious this is but

ah it's lots of pictures but it doesn't say what the bird's called

no it's not a goldfinch it's not a siskin

it's not a yellow wagtail it's a great tit

it's one of the tits Rose

That's an obvious one.

Anyway, there you go.

Maybe I'll remember it from now on.

Okay, I'm going to get on the crunchy track and head on back.

Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and conversation editing on this episode.

Thanks so much, Seamus.

Thanks to Helen Green, she does the beautiful artwork for this podcast.

Thank you very much to everyone at ACAST who work hard liaising with my sponsors.

But thank you most of all to you.

You are the hardcore.

And I hope you won't think it too creepy or twee if I propose a sonic hug.

Come here.

Good to see you.

Hope you have a wonderful Easter, and if it's all over by the time you listen to this, don't worry, there's another one.

It'll be here before you know it.

Until then, until then, go carefully, and for what it's worth, do bear in mind that I love you.

Bye!

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