Such uncanny interpretive dancing, dontcha think? And no prizes for spotting the really rather clever nod to the Sex Pistols in there too.

Recently in a rival magazine there was a letter pronouncing that they were finally fed up with Paul McCartney because he’d seen him on Parkinson giving the same answer to a Beatles question that he’d read in previous print interviews: ‘and if Macca can’t be bothered to come up with something different then I can’t be bothered with him’ was s the conclusion. Is this such a crime, Macca gets asked such questions all the time, I’ve noticed many repetitions – and why not? An enduring memory or anecdote becomes just that, other journalists read the cuttings and ask a question to provoke the same surefire story.

Now my work sometimes leads me to interview rock figures (I intermittently make documentaries for BBC4) and I also read plenty of interviews in Word and other magazines and books, many of them repetitious.

For example, a few years ago making a documentary about Emmylou Harris I looked through the archives of Later with Jools Holland. There she was rolling her eyes at Jools’ question about a letter she’d written as a teenager to Pete Seeger asking him what she had to do to become a folk singer - exactly the same as when we’d asked that a few weeks previously. Now I often go over an artist’s previous interviews to see what ‘the story’ is as much as I try to ask them about my own response to their life and art (as well as what I judge the viewer will get interested in). One of the frustrations is that they often don’t tell the story as well as the version I’d read before, though there are occasions when d a story comes out as never before or you get something entirely different and wonderful instead.

Perhaps our Word hosts and other members here have experience or feelings about this…?