Repetitious Rock Star interviews
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…?
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Slightly OT,
but on the subject of Macca and repetition, I went to see him a couple of times at Earls Court a few years ago. All the between songs chat was identical on both nights, and I do mean all, even what had seemed on the first night to be amusing ad libs.
hah - that is so true...
in 2003, i picked up that live album he did and there was a 'fumbled' version of 'You never give me your Money' where he seems to forget the words.
"Fair Play, Paul," I thought "for leaving that on the album"
Fast forward to the RDS in Dublin and a mate had given me a ticket to the Macca gig. I mentioned this 'fluff' of a song before the gig started.
We both looked on, horrified, as he did the exact same thing at our show.
He did do the first few lines of 'The Rocky Road to Dublin' on his own, mind...
Stage banter, worst offender
Worst offender I ever saw was one of my most loved musicians, Townes Van Zandt. Went to see him in the 90s, same jokes every night, including the 'accidental' plucking of a guitar string mid story. Then I bought his 'Live at the Old Quarter' LP from the early 70s...and you can guess the next bit.
Still his jokes were good, they way he told them anyhow:
Fella runs up to a policeman and says 'Officer, they stole my car.' The policeman asks 'Where was it sir?'. The man says 'On the end of this key'. The policeman says 'Sir, your fly's undone.' The fella says 'Oh man, they got my girlfriend too.'
and another
What's white and crawls up your leg?
Uncle Ben's perverted rice.
Could never figure out why that one was funny, but it was.
Stop me if you've heard this before...
...but I think this is a function of a very crowded media market. When, for instance, Emmylou Harris first appeared in the mid-70s she would come to the UK and who would be interested in interviewing her? NME, MM, Sounds, Rock On on Radio One, OGWT...er, that's it.
Contrast that with somebody at a similar level nowadays. Say Cat Power. When she comes over not only will all the music media want to talk to her but also there's all the broadsheets plus everyone on BBC from Newsnight Review to Woman's Hour.
Therefore the amount of time that an artist can spend doing promotion has increased massively. Given the constraints of time and the need, particularly in broadcast media, to "get her to tell that one about..." means that artist is soon reduced to just trotting out the same old stuff because the same old stuff is what the media tends to demand.
I often feel when interviewing somebody that we're on different frequencies. I'm listening out for the thing I can use and that will tend to be something that slots easily into a pull-quote - that's why so many of them contain a reference to some other person or an obscenity - and meanwhile I might miss the thing that they're really trying to tell me.
Sounds right. I try to
Sounds right. I try to listen for opportunities in what they're saying but still end up banging my head against the screen over how I missed something that's only now obvious they were bursting to say. Elvis is fairly unstoppable though - not least evidenced by how you just say ‘Go on' a lot in the transcript. I interviewed him once about Mose Allison, took ages to get him back from his fascinating digressions. When we'd finally finished I got from pissed off Imposters who'd waited all afternoon to soundcheck.
By the way David I always feel improved and inspired when you talk or write about books, so more please.
Emmylou
She kept me waiting for days, as I remember she did you for Word not so long ago...
erratum
Above was supposed to read 'I got pissed of looks', which I did...
Actually I pity the poor "celeb"
Asked the same question time and time again and to remember the situations and rationales embedded within the publics need to know (or journalists need to inform), the option is either to tell the truth, embellish or lie. The former may be repetitive, the middle will be caught out by the eagle eyed and the last option has to be either better than the truth or very funny; see under fathers ashes, snorting of. (But I still bet he did it!!)
Paul Simon
At about the time Graceland came out, I remember seeing Paul Simon interviewed on telly. The interviewer asked him what "Call
Me Al" was really about. Mr S didn't sigh or roll his eyes - he very quietly gave this answer:
"It's about a man who's walking down the street and he's wondering why he's soft in the middle when the rest of his life is so hard. He doesn't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard ..."
Michael Gambon
is known to frequently lie during interviews just to make them more interesting - to himself if not the journalist.