Writing about music: Submissions from the front line of local music journalism

Neil Pace

apr. 2016 · Neil Pace

Um þessa rafbók

I've been listening to music ever since I was small. A few years ago I started to write about it. I started to blog and to tweet and to generally annoy anyone who would care to read my secular evangelical rantings about Jonathan Richman, and my inexplicable love of kitschy popular music, disco, hip-hop and doo-wop. Very soon I was writing for the North East’s premier music magazine NE:MM, which became the North East’s premier music website. Most of my NE:MM album and gig reviews are included in ‘Writing about music’ – I’ve corrected most of the spellings, but I’ve left in all of the grammatical errors (I prefer to think of them as ‘quirks’). Many of my interviews are here too, Roger McGuinn, Nils Lofgren, Matthew Healy, Ben Watt, Fish, Kathryn Williams, Duke Special, Penetration, Thomas Truax, Steve Hackett and Nick Heyward, who told me he thought Haircut 100 were going to become Britain’s Talking Heads.

There’s other stuff too. Quite a few lists (let’s face it, making lists is what middle-aged men do best) including my favourite 50 debut albums, which proved hugely controversial with three people on Twitter. And (by the way, I regularly start sentences with ‘and’. If you’re easily offended, please look away) there are some excerpts from another book that’s in the pipeline. Quite a long way down the pipeline if I can be brutally honest.