"Maybe it's because everything else is really loud now. In bars, or a car, or on headphones when you travel by tube - you're just never going to notice Charlie Watts' hi-hat or Joe Strummer's delicate fretwork. Record companies think: if I leave any quiet bits in, I'll lose the public's attention!"
"Can you start again from 'In bars'?"
"OK." I clear my throat and unwittingly make a effeminate squeak.
"In bars" my voice has now taken on a desperate tone, "I'll do that again.."
"Whenever you're ready"
"In bars OR in a car... oh bollocks... excuse me."
"That's OK, take your time..."
Christ, who wrote this shit anyway? For a moment, I feel like Orson Wells in those infamous frozen fish adverts, then I realise, it was me, I wrote this shit. It's all my fault.
I'm in a plush studio in BBC Broadcasting House, recording a 'column' for the arts programme Front Row. A&Rmchair has caught the attention of some people there and they've suggested I do one of their spoken columns on some aspect of the music business. I pitched a load of things and the thing they've gone for is Remasters. If you've ever attempted to get any of your writing accepted by radio or newspapers, you'll know how it's actually the pitch that is most of the work: the persuading, the levering of call returns, the attempts at constant politeness when you want to scream: WHY AREN'T YOU GETTING BACK TO ME? In this case they were astonishing swift and the pitch was the easiest thing.
But of course, as every glass-half-empty person knows: nothing is ever easy. What occasionally happens and happened in the case of this column, is that once the pitch is accepted you discover that the point you wanted to make is not as straightforward as you thought and it's consequently much harder to write than you originally envisaged.
It turned out that my argument - about remasters being effectively the same record only a bit louder - was not quite right. Earlier in the week, the Guardian had asked me to write something about the EU's findings on the health risks of having your personal stereo volume up too loud, so I was getting into volume quite deeply. And the more research I did, the more I discovered about the 'Loudness War' that's going on in the music mastering industry. Mastering has always been about making Everything As Loud As Possible but with the increasingly sophisticated digital compression available, there seems to be a demand to make every album release like a TV ad - IE something which cuts through any background noise.
This means that if it's an old record (and by old, I mean pretty much anything before the mid-nineties) it won't bear any relation to how it sounded when it first came out, because every light brush stroke, every whisper and every cough is brought up to the levels of a kick drum or powerchord so that rather like this sentence there is no light and shade, no nuance or subtlety and eventually after a while it just becomes an unfocused background noise which anyone over the age of 16 finds they need to turn off to preserve their sanity.
So back to my 'column'. Just as I am punching the air with joy that I might be on Radio 4, I start getting the fear that what I've proposed this isn't a brief, pithy column where I can pretend that I'm as funny as David Quantick, no, it's actually a lengthy, detailed article where I should talk about Metallica and Elbow and the the Loudness War and get quotes from mastering engineers from the US and the UK and I bring in loads of my own experience of cutting records... and you know what, suddenly I find my prose becoming a bit laboured and worthy and I realise that I'm writing something for a trade magazine. Bugger.
In the I end, I think I manage what I think is a fairly acceptable balance between facts and a bit of observational humour. Something like this blog, I hope. Except I don't anticipate - blimey, you'd think by now I'd start planning ahead wouldn't you? - that the tweaks and rewrites I make should actually be typed into the script I'm reading from. As it is, I am now sitting facing the microphone surrounded by sheets of A4; some are print-outs of my original piece emailed to the producer, some have her suggestions on in blue, some are my hastily-written-on-the-tube notes which, like all my handwriting (even the the variant of it where I use a quill and vellum), are completely illegible.
As I read off my A4 spread, my head is bobbing about like Bruce Foxton as I look for the relevant sheet. It's no wonder I'm talking bollocks. Fortunately, the producer is a total pro, she makes me feel as if I'm actually quite important to the programme and even sends another producer away who wants to use the studio we're in. The fact that we've been in here for days and the actual presenters now want to come in and record tonight's programme is kept from me.
I quite like it though - being in a studio when it's me doing the recording. All my life has been about going to studios where someone else is doing the recording - I'm the just the person whose organised it, just the person who's putting the cash up for it. There've only been a couple of times I've actually appeared on recordings myself and then they were brief. The first was when Neil Hannon was making his second Divine Comedy album in The Church in Crouch End - incidentally, I'm not counting the first DC album as it is indie rock and not really part of the cannon.
I was friendly with him at that point, having tried to sign him but ultimately leaving it to his very capable label Setanta. The album, Promenade, features a track called The Booklovers and Neil had an idea to overlay the lyricless verse parts with the imagined voices of famous writers saying things they might have said. Everyone who popped by the studio was asked the same thing: pick a couple of writers from Neil's list and say something appropriate to them. I picked Mark Twain because he wrote my favourite book Huckleberry Finn and JG Ballard because I had just read Crash at the time (by the way, if you haven't read it don't be put off, it's much better than the film). So I did a terrible Southern accent for Twain and said "but I can't even spell Mississippi" and for Ballard I uttered the expression for dashboard which Ballard uses time and time again in Crash - normally when someone is having sex on one - "Instrument Binnacle". It is worth tracking down the album for the track Tonight We Fly which is the sort of song which continues to work on your body even after all the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up. Hannon's an underrated genius, who will eventually be recognised as such - I bumped into him several years after my recording experience with him. He was in John Lewis looking at fridges with his wife and I was still so star struck I didn't know what to say - no white goods gag came to me in my moment of need. But despte being proud to share an album with that song, I have to say Booklovers is probably one of its weaker tracks.
The second time I feature on an album is on Stephen Duffy's I Love My Friends, the second record he made for my label Indolent. He asked me to shout 'Oi!' on the track Something Good, so he could mix it in with his own lyric 'shouts'. I really went for it with every ounce of South East London yobbo I could muster, hoping my vocal prowess would possibly lead to more invitations from him. Sadly it wasn't to be, largely because, we never made another record together. You see, I was required to drop him by BMG (Indolent's paymaster) before that album was even released, a tragic story which most A&R people probably have some variation of. On the CD booklet of the few copies we originally manufactured, Stephen had dedicated the album to me but when Cooking Vinyl finally released it six months later, my name was inevitably missing from the label copy. Still, do try and hear this album (it still sounds amazing 12 years later) and you can hear my attempt at being a yob - albeit fairly low in the mix
I haven't heard the finished Front Row column yet. The producer has to edit it together and insert all the music I talk about - let's hope those remasters do actually sound different from the original otherwise we're all buggered. And let's hope I get invited back into a studio soon, I think I've finally got the taste for it.
NB: The piece was broadcast last night (Monday 27 Oct) so if you want to listen to it, go to the Front Row website, click on the Listen Again button for Monday's show and you'll find me about two thirds of the way through.
Showing posts with label Joe Strummer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Strummer. Show all posts
Friday, 24 October 2008
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Why I never got my hands on a Hirst
It was Joe Strummer who told me the news that they were going to wind up the company: "It's not working out - none of us can agree on anything - apart from that smoking's really good." Fair play to them though, it was the best redundancy I've ever had - being let go by the lead singer of the Clash. All the directors and myself had just consumed a massive kebab lunch at Efe's on Great Titchfield St ("These are my people!" Joe had said, referring to his childhood spent in Turkey) - it was clearly a planned coup.
I'm reminded of that time - the time, as I think I have mentioned here before, when I briefly ran a label for Damien Hirst and rock pals Alex James and Joe Strummer - because the artist is of course in the news again this week for being £111 million richer. Not so much Golden Calf as golden goose. I'm also doing some work at another music web site based not far from the offices where the label was based, so I get reminded of the sandwich bars I used to go to, where I used to sit and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. What?! I hear you say. Surely running a label for the world's most groundbreaking and successful living artist, your childhood hero from the Clash and the extremely personable bass player from Blur must have been a dream job! And initially it did seem like that was how it was going to be. But despite all the complicated stuff that I won't bore you with, the basic problem was that, as Joe rightly pointed out, they couldn't agree on anything - basic things like what type of music to sign, for example, were swept under a BonViveur's carpet with the oft repeated call of "Get on board!" An expression I heard Hirst use in a interview with Mark Lawson only the other day. I duly got on board but it was more Titantic than Double Deckers.
My job initially, was of course A&R but very quickly it became apparent that the job was everything but that; the A&R part, i.e. the deciding on what music we were going to put out, was up to the directors. And the director with the most in-your-face charisma was not Joe or Alex or even Damien - although they clearly put up some stiff competition No, the man who had that in spades was Lily Allen's dad, Keith.
Keith of course, had fronted the hugely successful Fat Les record Vindaloo which Telstar had released earlier that year to tie in with the 1998 World Cup. Now Keith had another event-related idea for Fat Les and the event this time was Christmas. Now the label name Turtleneck was actually going to become a real label. Of course I blame myself for everything that went wrong - you should know by now that I'm that sort of person. Clearly, the record was not a patch on Vindaloo in terms of pop simplicity or conceptual appeal but somehow I got swept along on the tide of Keith's enthusiasm. We all did. Well, actually, no, not all of us. Damien, didn't like it and said so. But he was outvoted. And very quickly, Keith's sketchy idea, written with Roland Rivron was fleshed out with Strummer on guitar, Alex on bass, Bryan Ferry and The The producer Bruce Lampcov behind the desk at Air Studios - and soon after Paul Kaye, David Walliams and Matt Lucas and a host of other soon-be-famous faces appeared in the meticulously directed (by Keith) video.
Naughty Christmas (Goblin In The Office) was no one's finest hour, it must be said. But we were all so wrapped up in it at the time that it felt like it could easily emulate Vindaloo and be embraced by a nation obsessed with the idea of cheesy Christmas past: Mary & Joseph and Morecombe & Wise as Squeeze once sang. After all, everyone can identify with making a fool of oneself at the office party. Actually, if the record had contained a fraction of the ideas contained in the video (which you must have a look at if you haven't yet - the quality on the above link is terrible but you'll get the idea) we would have been away. But even though you could hardly accuse Vindaloo of being lyrically verbose, Naughty Christmas went so far as to actually swerve the use of the word Christmas. Yes, that's right, we released a Christmas single which didn't actually mention the word Christmas. It's amazing we even got Woolworth's to stock it.
By the time Christmas arrived it was all over. We'd actually sold quite a few records - about 40,000 or something - a huge amount by today's standards and Keith's tireless self-promotion had done more than any amount of creative pr could do and made us a weeky fixture on LWT's chart show. But compared to the curry record which had sold a quarter of a million and of course, it also didn't have the cache of being connected with football. As a proud football ignoramus, I am always amazed at how much crassness is accepted in the name of the 'beautiful game' - do you really enjoy wearing all those synthetic fibres advertising airlines you've never flown or travel companies who leave you stranded?
At Damien Hirst's own office Christmas party - a relaxed affair at a lovely restaurant on the Farringdon Road, it was clear that we - the record label - were the runt of the Hirst litter. Everyone at Damien's company, Science, obviously thought he was wasting his money but actually he displayed a canny commercial nous that no one I've ever met in the music business had. At the marketing meeting I put together to discuss the campaign for Naughty Christmas, as distributer, plugger, PR and record company sat round the table discussing how many copies we thought we should manufacture and where we should stock them, Damien said, "Why don't we just make one fucking record and sell it for a million quid?" At the time everyone laughed indulgently: yes, very funny, Mr Hirst, you may not know much about music but you know what you like... Stick to your formaldehyde, sonny, let us professionals handle the campaign. What fools we were! Had we done exactly what he said we would have made a load of money and probably still got played on Radio 1. As it was, in the words of, oh probably Alex James, Naughty Christmas was "No Vindaloo".
Sitting gobbling quality chops at that Christmas party, with our record already a certified disappointment, I looked around the room and my eye alighted on a table of young, hipsterish folk who were about 15 years younger than all the alleged 30-somethings in the room. "Who are they?" I asked Damien's wife,"Them? Oh they're the spot-painters." Up until then I hadn't realised what almost everyone now knows now about Hirst's production line approach: he mass produces art in a way that record companies once made singles, whilst advocating making one copy of a record and selling it like an old master. Talk about being ahead of his time. And that's why last week, on exactly the same day that the know-it-all financial markets went tits up and all those people in their safe, proper jobs were made redundant, Damien added a quiet £111 million to his fortune.
If only he'd shown as much genius in choosing the music. That was supposed to be my job and, as I say. I blame myself for not putting my foot down and saying - "listen, what about the bubbly-haired singer we saw at the Bull & Gate? - he's good, a bit rubbish looking, I grant you, but he's got a great voice!" No, we never signed Coldplay. You can take a Hirst to water but you can't make it drink. And I did take the guys to shows - Damien was keen on Welsh indie janglers Murray The Hump and Keith came along to see them at the now defunct Falcon in Camden. Within two songs, he'd managed, via semi-complementary heckling, to divert attention from the band to himself. Murray the Hump didn't stand a chance after that. Keith just wanted to sign himself. Strummer had a huge musical knowledge but seemed pretty wrapped up with getting the Mescaleros together and never brought anything to the table other than a noble world music yen - he wanted us to sign something unusual. Alex, like me, wanted to get a cool indie band on the label - partly because that was his taste I think, and partly because he knew me best and was confident that that was what I could deliver. And Damien? Damien wanted to sign his mate Bez. I know, it sounds really prosaic, doesn't it - somehow you hope he would have had some ideas involving wild animals braying mixed with the sound of an organ transplant, all produced by Eno and the Aphex Twin. But no, Hirst plumped for the Freaky Dancer.
We once all went up to see Bez's band BMW (not sure how he planned on convincing the Bavarian car giant that they should share the name with him) in Manchester and they were more akin to a Skoda. After the gig we ended up in some house in Chorlton Cum Hardy, surrounded by some very frightening looking Mancunians who were overly keen on establishing exactly how much we going to sign BMW for. The next morning, the bloke I ran the label with, Alan, who had brought an disturbing amount of drugs with him, was getting no reply when he tried to phone Damien's room in the Britannia so he got the lift down to Hirst's floor to see if the great man was up yet - after all we had a train to catch. When he got to the room the door was ajar."Damien?" he tentatively asked before pushing it open. Instead of Hirst, there in the middle of the room was Bez - doing the Bez Dance! IN TOTAL SILENCE. Alan stood watching him for a moment before the Happy Monday noticed him. He stopped, gave him a a psychotic smile and said, "Alright mate... hey - you got any more of that stuff you ad last night?"
After Christmas , Alan and I returned to the Turtleneck office but it was obvious things weren't going to last much longer. Frankly, I couldn't wait for them to end. Working with hedonistic celebrities was like being a parent waiting in the car outside a party while your kids are inside having a great time. Actually, come to think of it I did wait outside the Groucho club several times. As I said earlier, I heard Damien being interviewed on the Front Row last week and he sounds a lot more mellow than he did in those days. Back then I remember thinking that if he hadn't done art he surely would have gone into some branch of entertainment, he had a wit quicker than most and an uncanny perceptiveness. On looking through a bunch of Polaroids that some of us had taken in the office, he paused on one of me standing on a table pouting into the camera. He looked up and said to me,"how old were you when your dad left home?"
I don't have many regrets in life but I must say, I do wish I'd left Turtleneck with some hard evidence that I'd worked for those guys. The obvious and most sensible thing would have been one of Damien's numerous sketches or doodlings that he did on postcards. I remember Alan nabbed one at the time and I think I may have mocked him for it. It's probably worth a few quid now. But actually what I really regret not saving, is nothing Hirst created at all. All I wish I had was a fax. I wrote the directors' biographies for the Turtleneck website (yes, we were cutting edge in 1998!) and everyone was fine with what I wrote. Everyone except Joe - he sent me a beautifully written three page fax. I say beautifully written in the sense that it was the same characterful handwriting you remember from various Clash books which reproduce it. But it was also beautiful in the sense that he managed to tell me he didn't like what I'd written about him (for example he objected to being cited for influencing U2, "I hate those guys") whilst being charming and complementary. And it was full of musical opinion too.
After Strummer told me that Turtleneck was all over, he suggested we go to the pub. And over several pints of fighting lager, presumably because he thought he owed it to me, Joe regaled me with war stories from the early days of the Clash. I went home with one less career opportunity but happier than I'd been in months. Yes, I wish I'd kept that fax more than any Hirst work.
I'm reminded of that time - the time, as I think I have mentioned here before, when I briefly ran a label for Damien Hirst and rock pals Alex James and Joe Strummer - because the artist is of course in the news again this week for being £111 million richer. Not so much Golden Calf as golden goose. I'm also doing some work at another music web site based not far from the offices where the label was based, so I get reminded of the sandwich bars I used to go to, where I used to sit and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. What?! I hear you say. Surely running a label for the world's most groundbreaking and successful living artist, your childhood hero from the Clash and the extremely personable bass player from Blur must have been a dream job! And initially it did seem like that was how it was going to be. But despite all the complicated stuff that I won't bore you with, the basic problem was that, as Joe rightly pointed out, they couldn't agree on anything - basic things like what type of music to sign, for example, were swept under a BonViveur's carpet with the oft repeated call of "Get on board!" An expression I heard Hirst use in a interview with Mark Lawson only the other day. I duly got on board but it was more Titantic than Double Deckers.
My job initially, was of course A&R but very quickly it became apparent that the job was everything but that; the A&R part, i.e. the deciding on what music we were going to put out, was up to the directors. And the director with the most in-your-face charisma was not Joe or Alex or even Damien - although they clearly put up some stiff competition No, the man who had that in spades was Lily Allen's dad, Keith.
Keith of course, had fronted the hugely successful Fat Les record Vindaloo which Telstar had released earlier that year to tie in with the 1998 World Cup. Now Keith had another event-related idea for Fat Les and the event this time was Christmas. Now the label name Turtleneck was actually going to become a real label. Of course I blame myself for everything that went wrong - you should know by now that I'm that sort of person. Clearly, the record was not a patch on Vindaloo in terms of pop simplicity or conceptual appeal but somehow I got swept along on the tide of Keith's enthusiasm. We all did. Well, actually, no, not all of us. Damien, didn't like it and said so. But he was outvoted. And very quickly, Keith's sketchy idea, written with Roland Rivron was fleshed out with Strummer on guitar, Alex on bass, Bryan Ferry and The The producer Bruce Lampcov behind the desk at Air Studios - and soon after Paul Kaye, David Walliams and Matt Lucas and a host of other soon-be-famous faces appeared in the meticulously directed (by Keith) video.
Naughty Christmas (Goblin In The Office) was no one's finest hour, it must be said. But we were all so wrapped up in it at the time that it felt like it could easily emulate Vindaloo and be embraced by a nation obsessed with the idea of cheesy Christmas past: Mary & Joseph and Morecombe & Wise as Squeeze once sang. After all, everyone can identify with making a fool of oneself at the office party. Actually, if the record had contained a fraction of the ideas contained in the video (which you must have a look at if you haven't yet - the quality on the above link is terrible but you'll get the idea) we would have been away. But even though you could hardly accuse Vindaloo of being lyrically verbose, Naughty Christmas went so far as to actually swerve the use of the word Christmas. Yes, that's right, we released a Christmas single which didn't actually mention the word Christmas. It's amazing we even got Woolworth's to stock it.
By the time Christmas arrived it was all over. We'd actually sold quite a few records - about 40,000 or something - a huge amount by today's standards and Keith's tireless self-promotion had done more than any amount of creative pr could do and made us a weeky fixture on LWT's chart show. But compared to the curry record which had sold a quarter of a million and of course, it also didn't have the cache of being connected with football. As a proud football ignoramus, I am always amazed at how much crassness is accepted in the name of the 'beautiful game' - do you really enjoy wearing all those synthetic fibres advertising airlines you've never flown or travel companies who leave you stranded?
At Damien Hirst's own office Christmas party - a relaxed affair at a lovely restaurant on the Farringdon Road, it was clear that we - the record label - were the runt of the Hirst litter. Everyone at Damien's company, Science, obviously thought he was wasting his money but actually he displayed a canny commercial nous that no one I've ever met in the music business had. At the marketing meeting I put together to discuss the campaign for Naughty Christmas, as distributer, plugger, PR and record company sat round the table discussing how many copies we thought we should manufacture and where we should stock them, Damien said, "Why don't we just make one fucking record and sell it for a million quid?" At the time everyone laughed indulgently: yes, very funny, Mr Hirst, you may not know much about music but you know what you like... Stick to your formaldehyde, sonny, let us professionals handle the campaign. What fools we were! Had we done exactly what he said we would have made a load of money and probably still got played on Radio 1. As it was, in the words of, oh probably Alex James, Naughty Christmas was "No Vindaloo".
Sitting gobbling quality chops at that Christmas party, with our record already a certified disappointment, I looked around the room and my eye alighted on a table of young, hipsterish folk who were about 15 years younger than all the alleged 30-somethings in the room. "Who are they?" I asked Damien's wife,"Them? Oh they're the spot-painters." Up until then I hadn't realised what almost everyone now knows now about Hirst's production line approach: he mass produces art in a way that record companies once made singles, whilst advocating making one copy of a record and selling it like an old master. Talk about being ahead of his time. And that's why last week, on exactly the same day that the know-it-all financial markets went tits up and all those people in their safe, proper jobs were made redundant, Damien added a quiet £111 million to his fortune.
If only he'd shown as much genius in choosing the music. That was supposed to be my job and, as I say. I blame myself for not putting my foot down and saying - "listen, what about the bubbly-haired singer we saw at the Bull & Gate? - he's good, a bit rubbish looking, I grant you, but he's got a great voice!" No, we never signed Coldplay. You can take a Hirst to water but you can't make it drink. And I did take the guys to shows - Damien was keen on Welsh indie janglers Murray The Hump and Keith came along to see them at the now defunct Falcon in Camden. Within two songs, he'd managed, via semi-complementary heckling, to divert attention from the band to himself. Murray the Hump didn't stand a chance after that. Keith just wanted to sign himself. Strummer had a huge musical knowledge but seemed pretty wrapped up with getting the Mescaleros together and never brought anything to the table other than a noble world music yen - he wanted us to sign something unusual. Alex, like me, wanted to get a cool indie band on the label - partly because that was his taste I think, and partly because he knew me best and was confident that that was what I could deliver. And Damien? Damien wanted to sign his mate Bez. I know, it sounds really prosaic, doesn't it - somehow you hope he would have had some ideas involving wild animals braying mixed with the sound of an organ transplant, all produced by Eno and the Aphex Twin. But no, Hirst plumped for the Freaky Dancer.
We once all went up to see Bez's band BMW (not sure how he planned on convincing the Bavarian car giant that they should share the name with him) in Manchester and they were more akin to a Skoda. After the gig we ended up in some house in Chorlton Cum Hardy, surrounded by some very frightening looking Mancunians who were overly keen on establishing exactly how much we going to sign BMW for. The next morning, the bloke I ran the label with, Alan, who had brought an disturbing amount of drugs with him, was getting no reply when he tried to phone Damien's room in the Britannia so he got the lift down to Hirst's floor to see if the great man was up yet - after all we had a train to catch. When he got to the room the door was ajar."Damien?" he tentatively asked before pushing it open. Instead of Hirst, there in the middle of the room was Bez - doing the Bez Dance! IN TOTAL SILENCE. Alan stood watching him for a moment before the Happy Monday noticed him. He stopped, gave him a a psychotic smile and said, "Alright mate... hey - you got any more of that stuff you ad last night?"
After Christmas , Alan and I returned to the Turtleneck office but it was obvious things weren't going to last much longer. Frankly, I couldn't wait for them to end. Working with hedonistic celebrities was like being a parent waiting in the car outside a party while your kids are inside having a great time. Actually, come to think of it I did wait outside the Groucho club several times. As I said earlier, I heard Damien being interviewed on the Front Row last week and he sounds a lot more mellow than he did in those days. Back then I remember thinking that if he hadn't done art he surely would have gone into some branch of entertainment, he had a wit quicker than most and an uncanny perceptiveness. On looking through a bunch of Polaroids that some of us had taken in the office, he paused on one of me standing on a table pouting into the camera. He looked up and said to me,"how old were you when your dad left home?"
I don't have many regrets in life but I must say, I do wish I'd left Turtleneck with some hard evidence that I'd worked for those guys. The obvious and most sensible thing would have been one of Damien's numerous sketches or doodlings that he did on postcards. I remember Alan nabbed one at the time and I think I may have mocked him for it. It's probably worth a few quid now. But actually what I really regret not saving, is nothing Hirst created at all. All I wish I had was a fax. I wrote the directors' biographies for the Turtleneck website (yes, we were cutting edge in 1998!) and everyone was fine with what I wrote. Everyone except Joe - he sent me a beautifully written three page fax. I say beautifully written in the sense that it was the same characterful handwriting you remember from various Clash books which reproduce it. But it was also beautiful in the sense that he managed to tell me he didn't like what I'd written about him (for example he objected to being cited for influencing U2, "I hate those guys") whilst being charming and complementary. And it was full of musical opinion too.
After Strummer told me that Turtleneck was all over, he suggested we go to the pub. And over several pints of fighting lager, presumably because he thought he owed it to me, Joe regaled me with war stories from the early days of the Clash. I went home with one less career opportunity but happier than I'd been in months. Yes, I wish I'd kept that fax more than any Hirst work.
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