Something for the weekend?

There was a brief period at the turn of the century when I entertained the idea of becoming a full-time music journalist.

At that point, I was working as chief reporter at the Lichfield office of the Wolverhampton Express & Star (once briefly home to a trainee scribe called Boris Johnson). Although I mostly enjoyed the adrenaline of our small news team having to come up with a front page lead story by 10am every day, I got equal, maybe more, satisfaction writing for the Friday pop page, compiled by another Pete (Carroll).

As the E&S was the biggest-selling daily regional paper in the country at that point, touring bands visiting the West Midlands would often be up for talking to publicise their gig in advance (especially if the show was some way off being sold out!). I ended up speaking to acts such as Elbow, Snow Patrol, The Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Muse, Faithless, Counting Crows, a very chatty David Gray, Moby as he did his washing up, and even Rage Against The Machine (whose fearsome guitarist Tom Morello, I can report, is a thoroughly decent bloke).

This also meant I got free concert tickets in exchange for live reviews of the likes of Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Manic Street Preachers and Eric Clapton. The best of these - and still my all-time favourite show - was seeing U2 on their Elevation 'comeback' tour for their All That You Can't Leave Behind album in 2001. Somehow, they managed to turn the cavernous Birmingham NEC into a raucous intimate club celebration. There were also church service vibes with Bono - who was travelling back after each show on that tour to sleep at the hospital bedside of his dying dad Bob Hewson - clearly in a state of emotional surrender as he sang tracks like 'Walk On'. The concert was equally memorable because Lisa was heavily pregnant with Rosie (who was born early, a week later), leaving me to wonder if we might have to make our own hospital dash as we got caught up in the bouncing arena aisles.

At the opposite end of the extreme, my most deflating interview was with the guitarist from an up-and-coming Coldplay, the soon-to-be heirs apparent to U2's world dominating throne. They'd been booked to play at the tiny Ronnie Scott's in Broad Street, Birmingham, in 2000, a few weeks after their hit single 'Yellow' went stratosphoric. Said guitarist really couldn't be arsed to spend 20 minutes on the phone with someone from a provincial rag for a sold-out show, and largely gave bland one-sentence answers to fulfil his PR obligations.

A much more pleasurable conversation was with Jimi Goodwin from Manchester band Doves (pictured above). After a candid chat with the bearded frontman in a small room in the bowels of Birmingham NIA (where his band were supporting the crestwave-surfing Travis), I got the train back to Lichfield so Lisa and myself could travel together to Brum for the gig later that evening. When I took my Sanyo dictaphone (remember those!) out of my satchel, I realised my bottle of squash had jammed on the record button and wiped the whole interview, which I then had to cobble together for the paper later that week using some embellished quote fragments.

The joy of doing these interviews was that I regularly got to speak to bands I loved, including Grandaddy, Teenage Fanclub, Eels, Mike Scott from the Waterboys, Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross, cult Canadian troubadour Bruce Cockburn, Mike Peters from The Alarm, and maybe my biggest hero as a teenager, Big Country leader Stuart Adamson. Tragically, the troubled Adamson was later found dead, aged just 43, in a hotel room after disappearing from his Nashville home. Maybe this explained the distance I sensed during our phone call which, from memory, was not long before he passed away.

Although you can never really get to know someone by spending under an hour with them, some interviews did go pretty deep. It was great to talk to Jason Pierce (aka 'J Spaceman') from Spiritualized about his interest in Ecclesiastes. He'd been signposted to the Old Testament wisdom book (famous for it's "there's a time for everything" and "everything is meaningless" lines) by the London Community Gospel Choir (who I also later interviewed) when they sang on one of his albums.

Perhaps the most engrossing interviews were with Wayne Coyne from Oklahoma pysch-pop oddballs The Flaming Lips. I spoke twice to Coyne around the time of his band's acclaimed The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots albums. The second occasion was at a beer-garden table outside a venue in Hammersmith overlooking the Thames, where the Lips were filming a weirdly funereal cover of Kylie's 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' for TV. Coyne (pictured at that time below with guitar) was endearingly frank and open as he spoke about his father's death, and the empowerment to live life to the full in embracing the idea that we're all going to expire (which he put to music in the song 'Do You Realise??').

This interview was for the magazine Making Music, a free glossy A3 monthly that used to be racked up in music instrument shops' doorways. I'd been writing freelance for them for a year or two including a cover interview with the Lips' semi-sister band Mercury Rev, then riding high with the critics' album of 1998, Deserter's Songs. This had seen me sandwiched between Mercury Rev singer Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Sean 'Grasshopper' Mackowiak on their tour bus parked behind Wolverhampton's Wulfrun Hall. Although I enjoyed our time together, I was slightly on edge throughout after my prep revealed that one of them had tried to gouge the other's eye out with a spoon on a flight a few years' earlier.

Interviews like this, along with album and gig reviews, could earn me up to a couple of hundred pounds a month, on top of my E&S wage. I also started writing for The Big Issue who were experimenting with new regional arts sections in their weekly magazine. So, it was great to see articles I'd penned on the burgoening cosmic country music scene in Birmingham, plus a feature on a Brummie Christian rap collective, getting a good showing in the magazine for the homeless (the only publication I now have a long-term subscription to). I was also actively seeking freelance work with then-esteemed magazines like the NME who agreed to print part of an interview I'd done with Mary Guibert, the mother of the late American icon Jeff Buckley, in which she spoke movingly about meeting her dead son in a dream. I was gutted when the NME pulled it at the last minute as they belatedly realised a similar piece, by another writer, had appeared in their mag shortly before.

It's easy to forget that these were the infant years of the internet and sobering to realise that hardly any of the hundreds of articles I wrote appeared, or survive, online as they would do if written today. Ultimately, the world wide web partly put paid to my dreams of making a full-time go of it as a music writer too, with magazines like Making Music (literally) folding within a few years and payment for online articles at that time virtually non-existent. In a way, I'm glad that door shut as uprooting to London (which would've been necessary) at a point when we had one, and then two, small kids probably wouldn't have been the wisest move.

Still, nominally at least, I keep my hand in by writing occasional reviews for websites like For Folk's Sake (there's a link to my 'work' for them here). It's not like the old days where I'd get sent a free CD (or record if they ran out - some of which are now worth a pretty penny!) and £10 or £20 per review in return. But it means I can still sometimes bag guest-list entry for shows or a free MP3 version of a new album before it comes out.

Hopefully, by now you've got a sense of how much I love music which, in turn, has loved me back during these past couple of months. Those of you who know me well won't be at all surprised that one of the first things I did after my diagnosis was to begin a Spotify playlist for sustenance (it's named after the James Finley quote from an earlier blog post). This started off with largely gentle/downbeat songs to soothe my soul as I lay awake in the dark, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But it's since morphed to include more celebratory and stirring tracks which help solidfy postive feelings as they arise, and sometimes create them when I need a nudge.

To be honest, it's growing every day and is now pretty massive, with over 130 songs clocking in at almost ten hours. I'm still determined to listen to it all the way through at some point! Several of the artists I've interviewed feature here, plus live favourites like Hot Chip. The playlist also includes two of my closest companions in Mavis Staples and Johnny Cash, whose 1958 Hymns album (a recent £3 pick-up on vinyl from Oxfam) offered deep-worn comfort as the cancer bombshell reverberated. There are a also couple of tracks from my brother-in-law Dekker who is finally starting to get the recognition he deserves for his penetrating singer-songwriting. Last week, along with turning me onto the new Blur single, he sent me the first song, 'Hero Myth', from his upcoming third album. It's one of the best things Dekker (or Brookln as we know him!) has ever done - you should check it out when it streams in the usual places on 16 June.

Anyway, if you've got Spotify, feel free to give the playlist a shuffle (skip anything that doesn't tickle your fancy!) - and send me any suggestions for additions...