[Previous chapter]
[The Music Website: January–November, 2008 (Tuesdays and Thursdays)]
Right. So. A couple of months after I started my new part-time Job at The Boutique Agency (which I’ll get on to right after this, Prospective Employer) I was offered another Part-Time Job; this time as editor of The Music Website where my oldest brother used to work. I was offered the Job by one of my oldest brother’s best friends; the brother of Kate, who sang in his band. We’ll call him Portillo. Portillo began as a junior to my oldest brother some time between the dot-com boom (DCB) and the by-now-well-underway global financial crisis (GFC). Very much the glory days for working at The Music Website, I gathered. Portillo gave no good reason for leaving; he just said he’d got another Job. But over the next eleven months I would come to imagine many reasons he might have chosen to leave.
To briefly address the apparently Nepotistic nature of this appointment, before I detail what if anything I learned from it: although I was never really a music journalist, I had, as I’ve mentioned, written for The Music Website before—mostly unpaid. The first time was on a visit to my oldest brother during a break from University. I’d Interned for Jory, then news editor, and learnt the ins-and-outs of recycling found new s stories and rewriting them in the The Music Website tone—a sort of clipped irreverent format, relying on daft puns and strings of insulting adjectives. That must have been in 2003, because I recall discussing whether the announcement of Justin Timberlake’s deal with McDonald’s should be headlined with “Cry Me a River of Blood” or “Rock Your Dead Body”. We went with the former, which was mine.
My second, more protracted stint began from the time I moved to The Great Wen in 2006, and continued on-and-off until I got this Job: I wrote a number of record and gig reviews for them, and a couple of festival write-ups. These were commissioned by Portillo. Portillo took me to a music festival in Wales in summer while I was still at The Conference Company. Like most festivals I’d been to in recent years, it was muddy and full of Middle Class Professionals, bussed in from The Great Wen—with whom I was concerned that I might be confused by the locals. I’d been to the inaugural outing of the festival way back in 2003, on my own, having tried and failed to persuade Girlfriend #2—not yet my girlfriend by then—to join me. My write-up of the 2007 event—which I’ve just re-read—was dull, occasionally annoying, and at least mildly spiteful; but still more readable than most contemporary music journalism. Portillo obviously thought it was adequate.
Unfortunately, when I’d mentioned during my Jobseeker’s Allowance appointment in Hack ney back in November 2006 that I’d been doing some Unpaid writing Work for The Music Website while seeking gainful Employment elsewhere—in an attempt to build a Portfolio of Work with which to woo a Prospective Employer—my allowance was Cancelled on the spot. Apparently doing any unsanctioned Work, regardless of Payment or lack thereof, was evidence of an attempt to defraud Gordon Brown. The Department for Work and Pensions never reimbursed me for that last month and a half I spent Jobless, and Job-seeking, before I began at The Conference Company; and I didn’t get so much as a thank-you from My Chemical Romance for my glowing five-star review of “The Black Parade”. So to conclude: I felt no Guilt whatsoever about The Music Website’s lack of a Transparent and Accountable hiring process. Not even when I met Portillo’s friend in the pub—a seasoned journalist and long-term freelancer for The Music Website who we’ll call Lemmy—and he said “I wouldn’t have minded being offered that gig.”
What I didn’t clock at the time was the past tense. He did not say “I want your Job, Alexander.” And it occurs to me now that when Lemmy said he “wouldn’t have minded that gig” (or words to that effect) he was almost definitely referring to Portillo’s full-time editor role; which now effectively no longer existed, having been replaced with my two-days-a-week editor role (apparently designed to fit around the three-days-a-week Job I’d recently begun at The Boutique Agency). Based on what my oldest brother told me, Portillo’s Job had already Paid less than what he earnt as editor back when the world was a bit closer to the DCB (Dot Com Boom) than it was to the GFC (Global Financial Crisis). But my oldest brother is a bit of an Unreliable Narrator…
I was happy, despite my Qualms, to accept Lemmy’s words as a compliment. I’d learnt by then to take them where you can get them. And if you can’t get them, to infer them where there’s a slight chance they might have been implied. Portillo, Lemmy and Jory were all Good Writers, and liked their music (rarely the same music I liked, but nobody’s perfect). They reviewed records, nicked and rewrote news stories from bigger websites, and interviewed bands—as was traditional fare for music websites. My oldest brother, by contrast, had made his name (various different names, in fact) by wholeheartedly embracing the “gonzo journalism” techniques of Hunter S. Thompson. Having barged his way into the music biz by pretending to be writing for famous magazines, he’d somehow arrived at The Music Website at a time when its financial backers were comfortably sequestered in the giant question mark that lay between phases one and three of everyone’s DCB-era business plan—where phase one was “Get a website” and phase three was “Profit”.
It was probably impossible for anyone involved to accurately gauge the relationship between the economic and cultural Climate, and my oldest brother’s actual influence on their website’s Fortunes. But people who liked music had often heard of The Music Website, and there was a vibrant online forum. I never saw my oldest brother actually Working when I visited him in The Great Wen, and he was rarely even in the office. But what my oldest brother lacked in technical Skill and Work Ethic, he sure made up for in DCB vibe. I’d been to the office back in the days when he was an editor, and it was an exciting place to be. They had parties. They had recording sessions. They had gigs in the wet bit downstairs, usually with his “comedy hip-hop” crew headlining. They made podcasts well before podcasts were a widely understood concept. The website itself was a mess. And it looked like they had a rodent infestation in the office. And nobody bothered washing up their cups or—by the look of the contents of some of the cups—getting up from their desks to go to the loo every time. As the years barrelled by, my oldest brother wrote less and less about music, and more and more about his Slurms MacKenzie party lifestyle and his not-entirely-unrelated drug-induced psychosis. But… either my romantic teenage notions of the rock ’n’ roll Lifestyle still cloud my vision of that period, or The Music Website was once a genuinely exciting Workplace—back when my oldest brother was there.
But by the time I turned up to take the keys from Portillo and “drive it like I stole it”, it looked like someone already did that—and crashed it into a ditch, become severely injured in it, lived in it for a while, doing their business in it, and then set fire to it (and possibly themselves) and left it for Nature to take its course.
Or maybe I was just Wise enough by twenty-four to see it for what it was: a knackered old warehouse in The Great Wen’s impoverished-but-aggressively-gentrified East End, half-full (or half-empty?) of chancers, grifters, nerds, outdated hardware, and… admittedly, massive teetering piles of CDs that you had to actually edge sideways round the desks to avoid toppling. It still had a certain “boho” charm, and I was still chuffed to be offered the Job—partly for the probability of a lucrative sideline in selling knock-off CDs and DVDs on Amazon. But the glamour that I’d still hoped to find there (despite having looked at The Music Website recently) was not. And it didn’t look like it’d be back any time soon. What had definitely changed in the half a decade since I’d first clapped eyes on the place was that Portillo as outgoing editor was the only remaining in-house writer. There used to be three or four. Maybe five? The tech people, though numerically superior, weren’t exactly legion either: two geeky web-developers, with a third brought on toward the end of my tenure, and an Australian IT guy next door—who’d always been there, and I assumed came free with the building. There was a fresh-faced graphic designer with a semi-famous dad: he was also Part-Time (officially or otherwise). And there was the American receptionist, who’d been there as long as I could remember. I didn’t really understand what she did, but she always seemed busy. Perhaps she wasn’t a receptionist? There wasn’t actually a reception as such, because you had to get through the wet bit downstairs and next-door’s office to get to ours. But she definitely answered the phone…
There were three older Bossman guys who I gathered owned and ran the place. But no one bothered to tell me exactly who did what. Maybe no one knew. I had to infer it over the months I was there. Or, more truthfully: I gave it a good inferring for a few months, then gave up caring. Bossman 1 was the guy I had to talk to about pay. He looked like a young Richard E Grant; my oldest brother had taken me for dinner at his house once when I was a teenager, but I’d never dared to talk to him. Bossman 2 looked like an ’80s cyberpunk movie bad-guy. He didn’t talk to me much. And Bossman 3 had a desk with the sister company next door: a minor record label or digital distributor or something. He spoke to me more—if with little more clarity—than the other two. Usually about music, usually when I was arriving or leaving. (He never left.) Maybe he was the boss of the actual website; because he had a much more internal vibe than the other Bossmen. (Like I said: he never left.)
I recall Portillo’s exact words as he wrote the handover email to introduce me to his PR contacts. The words he spoke out loud, that is, not the ones from the actual email:
“Dear failed music journalists—and, by extension, failed musicians...”
I did think it odd that he sat with his back to the tech team. Did they not get on? That seemed unlikely; everyone liked Portillo. Later that afternoon, when Portillo had left me to my fate, it started to rain. One of the tech guys went over to open the big wooden doors in the north-facing first-floor wall, and mumbled something something “petrichor”—which I thought was a bit cheeky, because I was supposed to be the writer. Shortly thereafter a steady drip-drip-drip began to fall from the rafters onto my Apple iMac G3, which I do believe had been on the desk since my brother’s time.
Bossman 1 and Bossman 2 were both out, so I went next door to tell Bossman 3 that there was a leak above my computer. He proceeded to explain that the cost of fixing the leaky roof of The Music Website’s office was greater than the cost of paying an editor to edit The Music Website for one year, and that I ought therefore to choose whether I thought the roof or the editor was the more important aspect of The Music Website at that moment in time. So, after a bit of back and forth, we agreed that I’d move the iMac G3 to the side a bit and put one of various unwashed mugs on the desk—which might also have been there since my brother’s time—under the leak, to catch the rain. It occurred to me on that first day that if my brother had been a very DCB-vibe editor for The Music Website, I was probably an equally GFC-vibe editor. Maybe in time I could learn to take some Pride in that, since we never had the same shoe-size anyway. Whether I was GFC and he was DCB by Nature or by Destiny I’ll never know, since the economy doesn’t allow controlled experiments of that kind. But I suspect it was a bit of both. Regardless, it was clear from the beginning—and would only become clearer during The Wrangling—that my editorship of The Music Website would be unequivocally palliative in Nature. While I’ve no doubt that my editorial skills were limited, this being my first Paid Job of that kind, the chief cause of the website’s decline over 2008—almost everyone agreed—was The Wrangling, which I will outline briefly before I get on to The Role, to provide the necessary context.
The Wrangling
The Wrangling was a term used to describe what was going on at The Music Website by those of us who were not tech people, receptionists or Bossmen (i.e. me, The Music Website’s former writers, the freelancers, the graphic designer, and anybody I knew who either read the website, used to read it, or began reading it when I told them I was writing for it).
See, for the majority of my tenure as editor of The Music Website it couldn’t really be called a website, because it didn’t really function like one—at least not like one that any of us non-tech people were familiar with. The Music Website used to look like a zine—heavy focus on artwork, photography, comic-strip-style drawings (often by my oldest brother) and crazy page layouts featuring narrow columns of text. It continued thus well into the heyday of MySpace, when the internet was still largely a thing onto which you projected your Hopes, Dreams and Ambitions. But as Time plodded on and Fashions changed—and, with hindsight, investors began to expect returns as the DCB gave way to the GFC—the MySpaces of the world (wide web) gave way to the Facebooks (or rather, the facebooks). The camelcase name of TheMusicWebsite had during Portillo’s reign been superseded by “themusicwebsite”: all lowercase; and this relatively minor rebrand was to be the lifted sluice-gate for the great flood we called The Wrangling. Nobody told me what ideology or motive lay behind The Wrangling, except to say that The Music Website was destined to become a more user-generated, social-media-influenced enterprise. This concept was heralded to the outside world with the addition of the innocuous word “beta” to the homepage, and would subsequently be “rolled out” by the replacement of the navigable homepage featuring links labelled with well-understood terms like NEWS, REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, and FEATURES with a new and exciting tag-(or possibly tab-)centric navigation system that better represented how the website actually existed in reality (i.e. code) and not merely how humans themselves might like to see it.
So where once the front page was awash with colour, illustrations, photographs, headlines, and a menu allowing a visitor to navigate to the Content they hoped might interest them, now it was a lot more like lifting the bonnet of a flying car and seeing a swirling vortex or ones and zeros that simultaneously had the “look and feel” of a digital black hole and yet also managed to exert the exact opposite force on beings of meat in terms of gravitational pull. While I’ve no idea whether light could escape from it, site visitors were soon doing so in droves; and no amount of Content I could produce seemed to have any hope of reversing the trend. People began to complain about The Wrangling on the forum, so the forum was removed as part of a wider effort to reposition The Music Website as a more social environment.
And it was all increasingly orange.
People used to be impressed when I told them I was working at The Music Website. Some fairweather friends of yesteryear deliberately refriended me in the mistaken belief that I’d gone up in the world. (You know who you are.) When I told them which website I was working at they’d say: “Oh, cool! I used to read that all the time. I’ll check your stuff out.” Then, with increasing regularity as the months went by, something more along the lines of: “What… what are they actually doing with that?” or “Why is it all so orange?” or “Where do I click to see the record reviews?”
The graphic designer—really more of a digital Artist with a graphic design Hobby—did his best to counter The Wrangling by producing wonderful cosmic hellscapes (also mostly orange) to paper over the cracks. But the cracks were always moving and spreading, and spouting luminescent orange code all over images and text alike; so riding The Wrangling was as much A Sisyphean Task from his perspective as it was from mine. Even the tech people seemed powerless to actually direct the course of The Wrangling—though I couldn’t help feeling it was likelier to be their fault than anyone else’s. They seemed to suggest they were merely sherpas tasked with guiding The Wrangling to whichever fabled summit it was destined for. And none of the Bossmen would discuss The Wrangling with me; they were far too busy either:
Having hushed and urgent phonecalls on their BlackBerries, nodding, gasping exasperatedly as they hung up, staring at their computer screens for a few sorrowful seconds and hurrying out of the office clutching a briefcase that I increasingly suspected was full of bricks (bossmen 1 and 2);
or
leaning back in their chairs, apparently deep in thought for 30 seconds, replying with a three-word cryptic crossword clue, and gently moving the conversation in the direction of Giorgio Moroder’s production techniques (bossman 3).
SEO (search engine optimization) was one discernible achievement attributable to The Wrangling. For a brief time toward the end of the year, anything and everything we published on The Music Website immediately appeared right at the top of the Google search results page for the relevant search terms—be it a band name, a news story, or the name of a member of staff, current or past. The pages returned were more-or-less indecipherable: mostly just linking to other tags or tabs on the website (new pages devoted to which were automatically generated every time you cared to add one, which was easily—even accidentally—done). For such a small Team, this was an impressive achievement. Each one of us could boast our own tag- or tab-generated webpage, buried somewhere under the digital landfill of orange ones-and-zeroes, where—for a time—we delighted in adding amusingly insulting tags or tabs to one another’s names, knowing these terms would immediately be returned on the first search-engine results page (SERP) if anybody wanted to know who we were and decided to ask Google. This apparently harmless fun came to a stop however when I added the tag or tab “LAIRY NORTHERNER” to a page belonging to a friend of Portillo’s, because he subsequently phoned up the American receptionist and demanded that this and all pages pertaining to his name were immediately removed from the internet; which it then took the tech team the better part of a week to work out how to do.
The Wrangling’s successes were always short-lived; because there were other people in other former-industrial buildings across the UK (and, so it would soon become apparent, in other countries too) who were similarly engaged. So as The Wrangling ran its course, less and less of the Content I diligently Produced from 8am–6pm each Tuesday and Thursday (and on many evenings, for which I was not Paid) was ever read by anything other than a search engine. And I began to suspect that it wasn’t really meant to be. My Work was merely “lorem ipsum”: placeholder content for whatever might one day be there instead—once the elusive peak had been scaled by The Wrangling, and The Music Website had become whatever it was The Bossmen and the tech Team were trying to turn it into; which I could tell by now was something that did not employ any writers whatsoever. With a decade’s hindsight, following the emergence of rumours sourced from former Colleagues and writers who sat beneath that leaky roof before me, I’ve come to see that the answer to this conundrum was pretty simple. A one-word answer, in fact. But I couldn’t have guessed it then because there was no word for it. Because the word was “Spotify”.
It seems the preternaturally stressed Bossmen were incredibly busy at all times trying to persuade various record labels (not least the four majors) to sign away the digital Rights to their back catalogues so that The Music Website could cease its Existence as a commercially unviable Platform for the deluded Rambling of small-time music journalists (and me) and rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the GFC to lance the throbbing boil of illegal downloading that was a plague on their once-lucrative industry/grift—with a slick, futuristic, and (ideally) very orange website, where you could pay a simple subscription fee to stream (but not own) any song that had ever been recorded, digitized, and signed over to a record label.
If this was indeed the plan, it was A Good Plan; and I wouldn’t have told it to me either. Unfortunately, in the nuclear arms race of commercial streaming platforms, many much bigger companies had a hundred-mile head-start. And the one major success-story that didn’t—but which was probably closest in terms of its humble origins and audacious aims to The Music Website where I briefly worked—was green. And everyone knows that while green means “Go”, orange means “Look both ways to see if anyone’s crossing, then go”.
The Role
I’ve mentioned that the role involved writing news, reviews, and features of a musical (or music-industry) Nature. I never had a Job Description; so I took my lead from Portillo, Jory, Lemmy and the rest of the DCB generation who’d made The Music Website what it was. But since I was of the GFC generation, I turned up an hour early, left an hour late, washed up my coffee cup at the end of the day and spent the vast majority of my Time there trying to listen to and review as many new and reissued albums as I physically could—with a focus on those that I felt were both less likely to be written about elsewhere, and really deserved some kind of wider audience and critical appraisal. Would I rather have spent my time snorting chang, chasing dragons, chugging flagons, shagging, gigging, ligging, turning on, tuning in and dropping out? Probably not, to be honest. It might have been nice to do one or two of those once or twice; but I’d enjoyed reading about my brother’s exploits more vicariously than aspirationally. And despite coming to recognize some truth in the words Portillo had been so tempted to write to his PR contacts upon leaving The Music Website, there were a few honest music journalists who simply made it their business to bring the music they liked to a wider public; and there were… even fewer—but still some—nice music PR people who were truly evangelical about some really great, if not necessarily mass-market-potential, music.
I’d not got the Job because I’d desperately sought it, but I’d accepted it because I was asked. After so much seeking of Jobs and so little getting, it was nice to be asked. So with the noble resoluteness (or so I imagined) of a captain going down with his ship, I decided to spend what time I might be afforded there being a positive force in what I already felt to be an increasingly jaded industry.
That sentiment survived for about a week. It soon became apparent there simply weren’t enough good albums being produced for me to be as positive as I’d have liked. For every North Sea Radio Orchestra, Wojtek Godzisz or Cadaverous Condition record I wanted to give time and space to, there were about 18 new Pigeon Detectives, The Wombats or Hadouken! albums being virtually shoved in my face. I knew I’d have to write at least some negative reviews of some major-label releases for the editorial balance of the website to have any credibility. But since I was the only person writing reviews at all when I began my stint, and I didn’t want to personally piss off the big PR contacts that were still bothering with The Music Website (particularly due to my potentially conflicting Job at The Boutique Agency—on which subject more later) I came up with the Ingenious plan of creating several personas under which to write and publish a share of the reviews. In fact, I don’t believe a single review I wrote for that website had my legal name on it. Since I shared a surname with my brother at that time—and despite several aliases, his was well known in the industry—I decided to go by a pen-name I’d later adopt by deed-poll as my “real” name; and to use two other made-up names borrowed from one of my numerous unfinished novels. Thus our core reviewing team of Alexander Velky, Emily Dover, and Jamie Janakov was born. Or hired. Or whatever.
One of these, I later realized, I’d accidentally stolen from someone real I’d known while secretary of the University Green Society. The other I’d invented, and was probably a grammatical nonsense in Russian—the language it ostensibly derived from—but might nonetheless be real in North Macedonia. I initially gave “Emily” the fair and balanced reviews and let Jamie stick the boot in to crap new-rave and landfill-indie bands while unfashionably enthusing about the genre-defying extreme metal acts I was fond of illegally downloading but never got sent CDs by. Anything I thought too well-written for my imaginary friends, I published under my “own” name. At least that was the initial plan; but eventually I was writing so feverishly that each persona lost any semblance of individuality. Thus, an editorial equilibrium was attained.
Interviews were a pain in the arse. I hardly did any. I’d done a phone interview with Herman Li from Dragonforce a few years back and messed that up royally when I asked him how it felt to have written the band’s first ballad for their 2005 album “Inhuman Rampage”. It turned out he hadn’t written it, and that they’d had at least one ballad on both of their previous albums too; but whoever digitized my illegally downloaded copies of those albums—in the interests of research, Prospective Employer—had evidently jettisoned the slow songs from their collection.
It turned out I could mess up worse than that though. That spring I interviewed the brothers Smee from Chrome Hoof—one of the best live bands I’d ever seen—in a pub round the corner from The Music Website office. Two hours in to an in-depth discussion about the commonality (or otherwise) between prog-rock, doom metal and disco, one of them narrowed his eyes and pointed at the dictaphone on the table: “Is that thing… on?” And, somehow, despite the fact that I’d definitely switched it on, it wasn’t. I interviewed Tunng in a different pub, and there were far too many of them; so I didn’t know which one to talk to, or which one was talking when as I tried to transcribe it. I also interviewed The Handsome Family and The Indelicates, and one or two other bands, via email. Email interviews always come across as stilted; but then, so did the real-life conversations with me, when I listened back to them on headphones in the office. The main reason I didn’t do a lot of interviews—aside from the dodgy dictaphone I’d got off my oldest brother proving unreliable on numerous occasions—was that they took ages to conduct and to transcribe, and the Results weren’t worth the Time: people who make music aren’t necessarily especially interesting when they’re talking about it. Besides, interview content didn’t generate any more traffic than the stuff I could bash off one-handed while drinking a coffee or shoving a salt-beef bagel into my face.
Record reviewing, on the other hand, was easy. I could rattle off two or three over the course of a morning—having listened to the records at least a couple of times already in my flat in the Burgundian Quarter or on the commute. I even sometimes asked the tech team what they thought about a record—if I was feeling benevolent, or if I thought the record was a bit complicated. (I didn’t ask the graphic designer because he was too young, in my view, to have a valid critical opinion.)
Gigs were trickier. I liked going to gigs, and accepted I’d have to go to some gigs I might not otherwise have gone to in the interests of maintaining a reasonably varied output of Content on The Music Website—and keeping PR people happy. (Tasks that rarely ran in tandem.) I sat through an utterly enthralling Diamanda Galás gig on the South Bank alongside Portillo, and I knew I was absolutely unequipped to translate the experience into prose—much less to critically appraise the performance from any position of actual musical knowledge or authority. I just wrote that it was really good—in as convoluted and flowery a way as I could manage.
To confess my Nepotism: I wrote at least one positive review of a gig by Jory’s short-lived pub-rock outfit who never even got it together to release a single. But I’d genuinely grown to love some of those songs over the months last year when Jory would frequently come in drunk at 3am and perform them very loudly on his keyboard on the other side of a three-inch stud-wall that separated our rooms in The Second Flat in The Linear Slum. I probably wrote a glowing review of at least one of my oldest brother’s solo gigs too. But The Music Website had been doing that for years. And besides, I probably used one of my aliases. So nobody would ever know.
Then there were the many, many bands that sounded a bit like Radiohead or Coldplay or Snow Patrol, and they were often really nice, and would apologize to their single-figure audiences profusely if the sound went wrong, which it usually did. I gradually tried to get other people who I thought might be kinder than me to review those gigs. Going to gigs two or three times a week was tiring—especially for a GFC journo who didn’t know where to get drugs and wouldn’t have had any Money to buy them even if he did. As the months went by it became commonplace for me to turn up to a gig I was told by a PR I’d get into for free, only to find I wasn’t on The List. (Ostensibly due to human error; but more likely because, for the first time in a few years, someone somewhere in the chain of command had actually looked at The Music Website). This was embarrassing and inconvenient at best. At worst: humiliating and depressing. By the third time I’d spent a couple of quid and the best part of an hour to get to a gig I didn’t really want to go to—just because some PR person had assured me I’d get free drinks all night while simultaneously witnessing some great artistic revelation—only to be told by the person doing doors that they’d never heard of me or my website… I couldn’t help wondering, what was I actually for? On at least one occasion this happened when I was on my own; which was even worse than it being witnessed by a friend I’d persuaded to tag along as my plus one, who could at least then share my indignance, and a pint at the nearest pub.
By that point any faith I had that The Music Website Job might become Proper had already completely faded. But the final nail in the coffin of my enthusiasm for perfecting the Art of music journalism came when I was invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to a major music festival I’d never heard of in The Low Countries. I had no Money at that time—and by no Money I mean whatever twenty euros was in pounds; which I was shortly to exchange for twenty euros. I was really excited by the idea of what would be my first proper holiday since I’d moved back to The UK from The Former Communist Country. A few of my friends and flatmates were planning a holiday to Syria (that dates it!) but I couldn’t hope to afford that on my Wages. But I was in possession of an old two-man tent, and was given the go-ahead to take a long weekend off from both of my Part-Time Jobs; so I tried to persuade a couple of people to tag along (since the PR woman had said that would also be fine). Portillo agreed to come with me: he’d been before and said there was a pretty high-end line-up—plus the disproportionate respect foreign music-industry types had for UK publications meant that free food, drink, and drugs would be available in abundance. The former I was especially excited about, as I hadn’t eaten many actual meals lately, and I could only afford to take a large bag of peanuts and my 20 euros with me. And the festival lasted for four nights.
Unfortunately Portillo dropped out a few days before the planned excursion; he was busy with the new music website he’d started with Lemmy (more on that later). Never mind. I’d been to a festival alone before. So I got the Eurotunnel train, which they’d paid for, and then a bus that stopped for petrol in Lille (to date the only time I’ve “been” to France) and then worked my way via train in broken French, with replies in angry English, from Tintinville to wherever the hell in Wallonia the festival actually was. I don’t remember, but a nice Dutch guy befriended me briefly en route, enthused about numerous (mostly British) bands that would be at the festival, and told me it was cool that I was a music journalist and that he’d been to the festival twice before and I was sure to have a great time.
When I got there I was instructed to hand over a hundred euros if I wanted to camp in Zone A—the zone where the PR woman said my complimentary camping spot with associated perks was located. I couldn’t get her on the phone, and neither could they. (I don’t think they tried.) And I didn’t have a hundred euros to my name, much less about my person. Thus, more incapable of being—than unwilling to be—shaken down, I was promptly directed to Zone D, a three-mile uphill trek away from the main festival site, and situated alarmingly close to a wind farm. Zone D was already pretty full, and the only spot I could find to pitch my bedraggled teenage-hangover tent was adjacent to an already-vomit-sprinkled pop-up bar playing loud drum and bass music, and exclusively serving cans of Stella Artois. I wrote in punishing detail about those five days for The Music Website—already almost completely unread by then—and it felt more like giving a witness statement than submitting a festival review, so I’ll try and keep this account relatively brief:
I got what felt like no sleep at all in Wallonia because the Stella Artois Sick Bar never stopped pumping full-volume drum and bass, 24/7. There was no free food, let alone drugs, and the water was disgusting. I survived only by strictly rationing the 500g bag of peanuts I’d brought with me, and by taking one long walk to the nearest Lidl where I could just about afford to buy some crisps, a ham salad (the only salad available) and a bottle of amaretto to decant into two litres of coke—which I had to smuggle in by claiming it was “jus de pomme”—so I didn’t die of thirst or misery in the interim. I had enough change from my twenty euros to buy myself one beer, on three of four nights. I never did get in contact with the PR woman. An unrecognized number kept trying to phone me during an awe-inspiring performance by Wovenhand on night three, when I’d briefly run into the Dutch guy from the train who was defying all expectations and stereotypes by passing about a massive spliff. I tried to answer the phone, and the battery finally died.
Goldfrapp were okay. I never saw Wu-Tang Clan because I left the main stage a mere two hours after they were scheduled to make their appearance to lie down in my wet tent and listen to drum and bass, and Wallonians vomiting. Cazals and Future of the Left were good. But I could have seen them back in The Great Wen. And already had. On the final morning of the festival, I emerged from my storm-wrecked corpse of a tent about a stone lighter than when I’d left The Great Wen to the enduring racket of obnoxious drum and bass. I looked up beyond the seething hordes of sleepless vomiting Wallonians at the pirouetting blades of the wind-farm’s many turbines, and mournfully suckled the last of my aloe-vera-and-fennel toothpaste. I lugged my suitcase on wheels in the direction of the train station, but abandoned my tent, with my dignity, somewhere in a field in Wallonia.
The English policewoman searching my case at Calais brightened up on hearing where I’ve been.
“A music festival? Cool! Were you there with friends, or…?”
“No, I’m a music journalist. I was reviewing it.”
She gingerly lifted some of my clammy shirts.
“That must be such a cool Job.”
“Yeah,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her. “It is pretty cool.”
At the end of the epic five-page festival write-up, completed shortly after I got home, and unfailingly offering my best shots at fair summaries of every single one of the fifty or so performances I’d watched, I wondered aloud (but in textual form) whether or not I’d ever see Wallonia again. The Australian IT guy was the only person to leave a comment:
“Let’s hope not.”
Freelancers
I was encouraged to build a Portfolio of Freelance writers at The Music Website; which wasn’t hard to do initially, since a lot of people I knew liked to write, and liked music; and there was even a modest budget (although I’m pretty sure I never got Paid for Freelancing for them). It became difficult to maintain people’s interest after I’d actually sent them the free CDs or gig-tickets, and asked them to do the Work, mind you. Especially once they’d taken a look at the Wrangled state of The Music Website. This was my first experience of “cracking the whip” as an Employer, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Especially as my “Employees” were mostly friends: Andy the Kiwi from The Conference Company; Shandy, Boots and Virgil from University; Greg from The MA Course. I think Cosmo from The Language School wrote for us too? I definitely got him in free to see They Came From The Stars I Saw Them while he was briefly visiting and sleeping on the floor of The Box Room in The Neglected Flat in The Burgundian Quarter (after I’d moved in with Boots and Olaf). But only a handful wrote for me on a regular basis—enough that I could, from then on, claim to have technically Managed a Team. They were all white Middle Class South English blokes, about my age, and thus woefully poor for our Diversity quota, which—save for Emily Dover, who wasn’t real—was null. There was one friend from Sixth Form who we’ll call Lou. We’d shared a girlfriend in Girlfriend # 1; but not at the same time. He later went on to Intern for Portillo and Lemmy at their new website (see below). Lou was pretty good. Another was Wayne: my best friend before I went to University, who wrote at least a record review a month the whole Time I was there, but, I found out when I left, never Invoiced for the Work. Wayne later told me by email—he moved abroad about this Time, and I never saw him again—that it felt wrong to be Paid for Work he enjoyed. (Do you agree, Prospective Employer?)
A third guy, Morse, got in touch because he’d done bits and bobs for Portillo before. I met Morse later at a festival in Wiltshire. He was a lovely guy; for a while Shandy and I would go hiking with him and his friends in The Rural Outskirts of The Great Wen at the weekend; it helped allay the ever-creeping Existential Dread of City Life. I didn’t rate his music taste highly, but he soon moved on to runn ing one of the UK’s biggest music websites. Which I didn’t. So make of that what you will.
Interns
Bossman 3 stopped me one day as I passed his desk, and said we should procure some Interns.
“Why?” I said.
“So we can get more content onto the site,” he said. “Without paying.”
I didn’t approve for numerous reasons. But I was nothing if not Obedient. He sent me a list of websites to advertise on. We gave it a week, and I picked the best two applicants—actually the only two that had managed to string sentences together that were wholly legible. One of them was a German, and lived in Germany, and the other was a teenager from one of those Up North places that probably has its own low-grade football team and special type of disgusting cake. They were both female. I still didn’t approve. If anything, I approved less. The teenage one wanted to come in less than two weeks. I raised the issue of safeguarding with Bossman 3; which was difficult for me to do because I didn’t actually know the word “safeguarding”, and wasn’t quite sure exactly what my Qualms were. I just felt concerned.
“She’s fifteen,” I said. “I’m not sure we should have a fifteen-year-old in here.” I gestured to the office in general, trying not to point at anyone in particular.
“Why not?” he said, smirking. Or I thought he was. I couldn’t always tell.
I felt like the Bossman was implying I could only object to hiring a fifteen-year-old girl as an Intern because I was worried I’d be sexually attracted to her. Which I wasn’t. Worried, that it. I hadn’t even considered it till he’d smirked. I thought on my feet (literally) and decided that my Objections to the Internships were twofold:
I didn’t understand how I was supposed to provide a satisfactory Internship for a schoolchild—or indeed a German/Gerwoman—lasting for a week (or more) when I only Worked at The Music Website for 40% of the Working Week;
(I didn’t tell him this one:) I was worried one of the Interns might be too good at writing for The Music Website, and that they might thereafter steal my Job.
Oh, and three: that they weren’t getting Paid, obviously. But I had to concede that they already knew that and had agreed in principle to accept that Arrangement. I still felt that this was, inherently, morally wrong.
“You seriously want me to invite a teenager in here then?”
Bossman shrugged and nodded.
“Who’ll look after her when I’m not here?” I demanded.
He gestured next-door, where I’d come from, with a tilt of his head.
“The team.”
They all had their headphones in, as usual.
“Someone’s going to actually open the door if she knocks, right? She’s coming all the way from [one of those Up North places that probably has its own low-grade football team and special type of disgusting cake]!”
“Of course,” he said.
He seemed to find my discomfort amusing. Maybe I was Overreacting. Maybe I did worry too much about everything. As it transpired, the first Intern turned up on time as expected on the agreed Monday; she sent me an email to say she’d arrived and said the Team were “really nice”. I’d met the Team, so either that was a mild overstatement, or they already preferred the Intern to me after only half an hour in her company. I can’t remember her real name, but I think it began with a B so we’ll call her Lisa. Lisa was a bright, enthusiastic “lass” (which is northern for "girl") with a softish Yorkshire accent. She was studying Music at GCSE, and hoping to do so for AS-Level too. A whole busload of kids from her secondary school had come down with two teachers to stay in a hostel off a main street in central The Great Wen and complete Internships all across the city over the course of a week. This wasn’t something they did at my secondary school; I’d had to be content with Work Experience at The Photography Shop. I did wonder whether she’d run away from home or something. And why the hell had she ended up applying to The Music Website, of all places?
“Actually, my first choice fell through, so I had to find another in a hurry!” she admitted.
It made a bit more sense now. Anyway, Lisa wrote a few news stories and record reviews over the week. I gave her the new Coldplay album, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to bother listening to it. (It was ‘Viva La Vida’, which I later discovered was the only Coldplay album I did like.) Lisa was A Good Intern. She wrote at about 10% of the pace I managed, as a seasoned Professional Writer; but there were no spelling mistakes or anything. She used the word “glissando” in her ambivalent, even-handed Coldplay review, and I had to ask her what it meant. I still wouldn’t know one if I saw one. On the Thursday I had to take her out to a gig after work. They told me this after she’d left on Tuesday. A gig?! Yes. Any gig. Didn’t matter which. Okay: it was one thing having her in the office, but taking a fifteen-year-old to a gig? Cue more safeguarding Qualms from me—again, without the actual word “safeguarding”, because I still didn’t know it. And evidently neither did they.
“It’ll be fine” they all said. A couple of the Team agreed to come along, which made me feel a bit less worried about the whole thing. There weren’t many gigs on that Thursday, as it happened. But there’s always something on in The Great Wen. (That’s one of the Guarantees, along with the pollution and Existential Dread.) We went to see a competent, dreary guitar/keyboard indie band in Islington. Nobody else from the Team turned up. Or maybe they did, but quickly left. We did at least manage on this occasion to get in free, at the risk of giving her an unreasonably glamorous notion of Life as a music journalist in The Great Wen in 2008—which I didn’t hesitate to Qualify as soon as we were past the door. She’d put on loads of make-up, and high heels that rendered her a few inches taller than me; but she still very much looked like a 15-year-old girl that I had taken out for the evening. I swear people were glaring at me like I was a Pervert or something. (Maybe they always did though, and I just didn’t notice.)
There was an Awkward moment where I offered to buy her a drink and was suddenly worried she’d ask for a double vodka and Red Bull or something. (Obviously I wouldn’t have bought her alcohol, Prospective Employer.) Fortunately she asked for a lime and soda. We watched the band and had a few more drinks and a chat. The band were about as bad as I expected. I felt on edge the whole time. I wanted it to be fun; I wanted to make her feel comfortable, like it was… a normal night out. But the situation didn’t feel normal to me. I still don’t think it was normal. I mean, where was her teacher?! I wouldn’t want my teenage daughter (if I had one, which I very nearly do) hanging around The Great Wen with unknown music journalists. (Or even with well-known ones.) I’m pretty sure it’s not legal; and if it is, it definitely shouldn’t be.
Her hostel was on my bus route home, fortunately; because I don’t think I’d have felt comfortable abandoning her at any old bus-stop. I didn’t feel that comfortable letting her get off at one, on her own, at night, in the middle of town, either; but when it came to it, it was either that or follow her off the bus like a Weirdo and walk her to the door of this alleged hostel, wherever it was. She said it was really near the stop, so not to worry. I was Anxious that I didn’t know what was The Right Thing to do in this Scenario—the whole damn reason I hadn’t wanted Interns in the first place!
Well, that and the fear of them taking my Job.
The bus went ding, she got up, and I said goodbye and thanks for all the writing: it was really very good; I hoped she’d enjoyed her trip and had a good last day tomorrow—I’d be back at the other Job I had to Work to support my music journalism Habit. Not a valid Career Choice these days; especially not if you actually know anything about music, in which case you can probably get a better Job anyway—ha, ha! No, honestly, you really should. Okay! Bye! Take care! Bye!
I stood up and shook her hand.
Not sure if that was the right thing to do, but it always feels weird to wave at people stood right next to you. And I wasn’t going to kiss her or hug her or anything like that, because she wasn’t my actual daughter, and I wasn’t French. I watched her walk up the street and round the corner thinking please, PLEASE, get back to your hostel without being raped or murdered, Lisa. I wondered what it was like being a fifteen-year-old girl. If being a fifteen-year-old boy was anything to go by, shit, I imagined. But she’d seemed happy enough. I got an email from her next week, thanking me for the Internship and asking me to fill in a Performance Review sheet for her teacher. So I’m pretty sure she got back to the hostel.
The German Intern was significantly less stressful for me. She was 19 and had friends in town, so I felt no responsibility for her whatsoever. She was mildly attractive, but completely uninterested in me—and music journalism, it transpired. She did no Work whatsoever in the two weeks she was at The Music Website, and only contacted me once subsequently: to ask for the graphic designer’s mobile number. She was A Bad Intern.
Good Job or Bad Job?
In terms of Solidarity, The Music Website left me wanting. I liked pretty much everyone there; but the atmosphere was on a downer from the get-go, and I was powerless to buoy it. Having three Bossmen—all of whom seemed broadly indifferent to my Employment at The Music Website—was A Nightmare Scenario. I’ve mentioned Bossman 3 a few times, and Bossman 2 only ever spoke to me about music, and never the music I put on the stereo. I knew that Bossman 1 (Withnail) had been very fond of my oldest brother, which only made his complete indifference to me the more crushing. The one time he came over to talk to me at my desk was shortly after I’d published a news story casually referring to a retired musician as a “garage-door-faced warbler”. Innocuous Content, Prospective Employer: consistent with the Brand Voice I’d inherited from a succession of former editors at The Music Website. But it turned out that The Retired Musician was one of The Music Website’s main financial backers: The End-of-Level Bossman (if you will) who effectively Paid two fifths of my Rent; I was gently but sinisterly encouraged to rethink the compound adjective.
When the time came for a Full-Time Job offer from The Boutique Agency where I’d been Working throughout and before The Music Website Job, I had to make a Choice as to which way my path would wend. But really, there was no Choice to be made. I told Withnail The Boutique Agency wanted me Full Time, and he smiled weakly, held my gaze, and said nothing—as if wondering why the fuck he should give a shit about something like that.
“I don’t suppose there’s much likelihood I’ll be needed full-time around here any time soon?” I said. Not sure whether to sound Hopeful or Jovial—or whether I should just have emailed, or just said nothing and not turned up next Tuesday.
Withnail shook his head.
I think the graphic designer and the tech guys came to my Leaving Drinks. I can’t remember whether the American receptionist came, but she and the Australian IT guy—and the whole Team, really—had all but worn T-shirts declaring that they’d preferred The Music Website back when my oldest brother was its editor. I didn’t take it personally; so had I. Living in The Shadow of My Brother from the get-go, there was never much Dignity in that Job, even before I abandoned the last of it in a field in Wallonia. As for Productivity; I Worked Hard, but ultimately Produced nothing of lasting Value. They didn’t replace me as editor. And nine months later all my Content—and Jamie Janakov’s, and Emily Dover’s, and my Team of Freelancers’—was removed from The Music Website for good, as it was switched to… whatever comes after “beta”, once you’ve publicly tested your website to the point of irreparably breaking it. (Gamma? Delta? Omega?) Fearing for my bald Portfolio, I requested a copy of everything I’d ever written for The Music Website under all of my aliases, and the Australian IT guy emailed me three TSV files comprising over 180,000 words, which my fag-packet calculation renders as about 2,000 words for each and every day I worked there, with a payment of approximately 3 pence per word—which sounds completely insane, and simultaneously just about right.
However: nobody read many of those words, and nobody was ever expected to. And they will never be republished. I wanted The Music Website to succeed; I would have Worked there every Working day if they’d offered to Pay me the 18k pro-rata rate for five instead of two. But it was never to be a Proper Job, and taught me very little except not to say on the Internet that your Job predecessor's friend is a lairy northerner, or that your End-of-Level Bossman has a face like a garage door.
So The Music Website Job was A Bad Job.
Concluding notes
The Music Website I worked for in 2008 still exists. Or at least, its domain-name is still registered; but it’s now inexplicably occupied by a guy called Joe from Tampa, Florida, who offers finance, business and real-estate advice. He has reverted to presenting the name of the website in camel case.
My “Career” at The Music Website began during my Internship in 2003 with a news story entitled “Cry Me a River of Blood” about Justin Timberlake signing a multi-million-dollar deal with McDonald's, and ended in 2008 with the reproduction of an announcement by former Blur bassist Alex James of the release of a new cheese called “Blue Monday”.
The bottom fell out of the second-hand CD business at almost exactly the same Time as I began this Job, because the illegal downloading of mp3s was already reaching Market Saturation; so I was tragically unable to supplement my Income from The Music Website to any significant degree by peeling off the “not for resale” stickers from promotional copies of the albums I was sent, and listing them on Amazon.
In summer 2008, Portillo and Lemmy invited twelve music journalists—and me—to an Indian or possibly Bangladeshi restaurant on Brick Lane to announce the poorly kept secret that they were starting Their Own Music Website: initially a blog, with a full site funded by paid advertising to follow. They wanted all of us to write for it. There was no Money to begin with; but they hoped and expected that there would be Money, and regular Jobs, in Time. It was nice of them to invite me, and to Pay for the curry. But I no longer fancied the idea of writing without being Paid; that seemed even less fulfilling than writing without being Read, which was dismal enough. I DJed once (i.e. I played some records) at a regular music night they put on at a pub not too far from where I lived. And After The Music Website shut down I’d make an effort to read Their Music Website; but I couldn’t help thinking that free music-streaming services (ads notwithstanding) had rendered music journalists Superfluous to Customers’ Requirements. I pitched them a couple of half-baked article ideas over the following years; but by then they’d no need of me because they had plenty of other people wanting to write for them. So I never had anything published on Their Music Website—which might explain why it’s still going, over a decade later, as yet Unwrangled.
[Next chapter, Mid-March, probably...]
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