Rocking the boat ... the late critic-turned-artist Roy Hollingworth
It's been intriguing to hear my various colleagues' views on the matter of friendship between artist and critic, largely because I've never previously considered it for a minute. The music industry should, in theory, be the most corrupting of all. As anyone who's seen Almost Famous knows, the job of a rock critic involves spending weeks on the road with impossibly charming longhairs and their groupie consorts, sharing laughs, profound philosophical insights, horrifying drug experiences and the favours of the drummer's "old lady" while wrestling with a terrible internal dialogue about critical objectivity.
For all I know, this may have been a fairly accurate reflection of life for a Rolling Stone employee thirty-five years ago, but it doesn't bear a great deal of comparison with the rock hack's lot today. Anyone who starts writing about rock music harbouring fantasies of meeting your heroes, dazzling and bewitching them with the brilliance of your conversation and thus becoming a friend and trusted confidant is going to be very disappointed very quickly.
Today, your average interview consists of an hour and half, usually in a hotel room. If you're really lucky you get some down time with the artist, which means hanging around their dressing room getting, or watching them being interviewed by someone else, or going out to dinner with them. It's enough - if you keep your wits about you and stay observant - to get a couple of thousand words out of, but it's not enough to base a lifetime of undying fealty on. After it happens a couple of times, even the most naïve journo is going to stop looking at interviews as a means of extending their contacts list in more glamorous directions.
And really, is that such a pity? If the history of rock music tells you anything, it's that the most interesting music is usually made by people so dreadful that, were they to come round and knock on your door, you'd turn the lights off and lie on the floor. Lou Reed, James Brown, Brian Wilson, John Lennon: you can and should marvel at their mercurial genius, but why on earth would you want to hang out with them when you could be in the pub with your proper friends, who - unless you need to pick your friends more wisely - aren't going to take vast quantities of meth-amphetamine and behave like an unspeakable shit to everyone, or threaten to shoot you for using their private toilet, or sit around in their bathrobe for years on end doing coke or suddenly launch into a hilarious impersonation of a mentally handicapped person while lecturing you on world peace and forcing you to listen to their wife's avant-garde singing?
As the late rock critic Lester Bangs pointed out "I don't know how much time you have spent around bigtime rock and roll bands. You may not think so, but the less the luckier you are in most cases." I'm certainly not complaining about my job (no rock critic should complain about their job, lest someone interrupt with the not-unreasonable suggestion that you go and do something useful for a living instead). I'm simply noting that if you know your stuff, the idea of becoming pally with a rock musician should be anathema to you: you should know that the people you admire the most are unlikely to be people you'd want to pick as friends.
And really, what sort of idiot becomes a critic in order to make friends? The clue's in the job title. You're expected to criticise people, and people don't like being criticised. The role of a critic can be many things, but one thing it patently is not is a popularity contest. And to pre-empt the inevitable response, I'm perfectly aware that in my case that's just as well.
