Did I Passively Ingest Heroin Being Smoked by a New Rave Band?

In a new feature, we ask some of our favourite music journalists to cast their lager-braised minds back to the times they met their musical idols. We find out whether they ended up making a new best friend or scurrying back to the office in humiliation. This week: Priya Elan

Priya was one the reasons we wanted to be music journalists instead of contributing to society. His hilarious reviews in The Guardian and NME had more lulz per sentence than anyone else. He once described Calvin Harris's singles catalogue as "so identical they are basically the Hitler Youth of the charts". These days Priya is the Senior Culture Writer at Grazia. We got him to tell us whether writing about music is all it's cracked up to be.

Questions I’ve asked myself in my time as a music journalist – did one of the Sugababes just give me The Eye? Did I passively ingest heroin being smoked by a new rave band and a trust fund celebutard? Did Kanye West just mistake me for A Stroke (probably Nick – BURN)? Did Nicki Minaj/ Lady Gaga/ Peter Hook/Simon from Biffy Clyro just threaten my life? Hmm, maybe. I mean I *think* all these things happened but I was too addled in a disgusting red wine/cider fug (sorry, but it was the mid-noughties) that my memories have all the hand-held clarity and dodgy VHS-tape focus of a My Bloody Valentine video from 1988.

I never, ever, ever, ever wanted to be a music journalist. Mainly because I didn’t even know what the hell that was. In my mind there were only two or three career choices; doctor, lawyer, dentist and any other Asian cliché jobs you’d care to mention (EASTENDERS script writers, this one’s for you, babes). Sure I was a sickly precocious child, the one who soaked up Prince, Sonic Youth and The Velvets before I had my first proper snog but it got qualified by feeling like an utter freak with absolutely no frame of reference for these things.

I got laughed out of town for heading to HMV in my school lunch break to buy a Pavement album on tape (WHO’S LAUGHING NOW SIMON BURWOOD?), my dad used to cackle and say “we had a servant boy who looked like him,” as I’d watch Prince do some contortive splits on my Lovesexy live video (which I’d lovingly taped off the telly) and he’d take the piss out of the banjo sound on Neil Young’s "For The Turnstiles" – ganging up on me and Neil with my cousin when I put the ancient tape of Decade on the car stereo. (I mean REALLY. My dad’s record collection consisted of the first Brotherhood Of Man album, something called ‘Boxcar Willie’ and a perhaps-used-for-self-pleasuring-purposes copy of Crystal Gayle’s Greatest Hits).

I wrote too. Terrible sub-Alanis poetry, plus an acclaimed (by me) short story about time travel, which ended with the line: ‘It’s now 1978 and I’m Clem Burke, the drummer with Blondie’. God, don’t you just really, really hate the child me? I remember music mags that were seminal to me – Q’s Best of the 80s issue, Mojo’s Best Albums Ever issue. There was also the time I became pen pals with The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker (*saves story for book/free pamphlet inside DON’T PANIC promo envelope of crap/ Buzzfeed list LOL*). But I never thought I could make a career out of music journalism.

By the time I was a teenager, I really, really, really, really wanted to be a music journalist. When a friend pointed out an ad for a junior writer on Select I applied (and failed). I realised it was an actually bloody job. I’d spend hours and days honing emails and physical letters to various editors and not so senior staff members at music magazines begging them for work. I’d try to be funny, smart or lie outrageously to get heard. When I did hear back it was inevitably in the form of a robotically penned rejection letter. I had so many that when a new one arrived, I’d rip it out of the envelope and just scan read it for the key words. ‘Sorry’, ‘Unfortunately’. I mean it was like everyday with my parents, but I digress. I had so many that I thought about making a massive collage featuring a black and white Julie Burchill sat in the middle (at the time still the high watermark example of the music journalist) and all my rejection letters pasted around her like some terrible flower. God, don’t you just really really hate the teenage me?

I eventually ended up writing for a music website for free, interviewing such illustrious figures like One Of The Crash Test Dummies and The One From The Moldy Peaches That Wasn’t Adam Green And Got Fucked Up On Meth And Was About 47. I asked her about Garfield.

When I finally got to NME, I was literally in some sort of disbelieving heaven. It was an interesting time – indie was going through some renaissance for the first time since Britpop and I guess there was money in the room. New Cross, New Rave but also that weird period where everyone and their mum suddenly liked the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz and Interlol (well, probably not your mum). Fashion and music collided! Unfortunately, in the end, only to create a new range of angular clothes in Topshop designed by Fearne Cotton (AMAZING! Etc).

For me, the most wonderful thing was the writing; when you got into the zone – a sort of unconscious place where some part of your brain communed with the music and got expressed via a sarcastic comment about Lidl –it was the best feeling in the world.

Gradually, the money got sucked out and things got a little bit weird and corporate – I decided to leave after being strong-armed into interviewing Keane and hating myself for a) giving page space to the musical equivalent of quilted loo roll and b) thinking ‘Oh, they were actually BLOODY DECENT CHAPS’. So a double self-loathing fest. Great.

What I’m trying to say is: all those things in the first paragraph totally happened and that’s why it was amazing.

Follow Priya on Twitter: @PriyaElan

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