After three decades of interviewing pop stars, Sylvia Patterson is “deeply uncomfortable” with it happening to her. With the imminent publication of her memoir, I’m Not With the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music, there’s going to be a lot of being on the other side of the tape recorder, and she’s horrified.
“I have absolutely no experience of this,” says Patterson, 51, blond, warm, and sharp as a tack, her eyes gleaming as we sit chatting in her publisher’s office. We were music journalism contemporaries “back in ver day”, as Patterson puts it (her at Smash Hits; me at the NME). As an interviewer, is it just really difficult to be the interviewee? “Yes!” she exclaims, in her robust Scottish tones. “The famous have been waiting to be interviewed all their lives, they want the spotlight, I’m naturally averse to it.”
What bothers her isn’t the rock’n’roll revelations (drink-drug benders; sometimes hair-raising skirmishes with the famous; general music-biz insanity) – though there are plenty of those, including encounters with Madonna, Prince, Oasis, Eminem, Manic Street Preachers, U2, Beyoncé, New Order, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Blur, the Beckhams, and many more.
Patterson’s problem is the “personal stuff”. For a long time she didn’t want to write about her difficult upbringing in Perth (her late mother was an alcoholic), dodgy relationships, health problems (at a rock festival, she broke her arm so badly, there was a risk it might have to be amputated) and the miscarriages she suffered in her late 30s and early 40s. Even after her family had given her their blessing, she was reluctant. “Why would anybody be interested in my personal story?” she says. “But I realised that I couldn’t just be a disembodied voice. So I thought, I’m going to write this, be real, and upset myself something ridiculous. I just went for it, because every human being has a background to their professional life. Even me.”
I’m Not With the Band emerges as a vibrant, albeit dark and poignant memoir, which also serves as a sociological pop document – going from the “Big Four” (Kylie/Jason/Rick Astley/Bros) mid-to-late-80s era, when Patterson joined pop magazine-cum-cultural phenomenon Smash Hits (selling 1m copies an issue at its peak), through the Britpop 90s, to the present day.
It’s absolutely hilarious – there were times I could barely breathe because I was laughing so hard. Beyoncé is asked whether she’s ever been sick down her cleavage. A sweetly young Amy Winehouse is chided by Patterson: “Drinkers Rule Number One: Have Your Tea.” A grimly sterile Victoria Beckham perfume launch is refashioned as a comic masterpiece. Bono (“looking, frankly, like a decrepit old punk dude down on his luck”) apologises for his “mullet and specs”. Mick Hucknall runs away when Patterson attempts to seduce him by delivering a copy of his Smash Hits interview personally. “If he’d been up for it, I would have been,” confirms Patterson. “How embarrassing! But I was only 21.”
Then there’s Prince (“The Purple Perv”) who admires Patterson’s shoes. “I was trying to keep the explosions of privilege and hilarity in,” she says. “Prince was huge in the 80s, untouchable, and to have him there, right in front of me, was amazing.” Obviously, some of Patterson’s interviewees, including Prince and Winehouse, have since died. What does she think of 2016’s slew of artist deaths – the year had barely started before we’d lost David Bowie? “All that just makes me feel that we’re thundering towards death! It’s the goth within. But it also makes me feel like, well, I’m not dead yet.”
Her favourite interviews were with Johnny Cash (“I was beside myself!”) and Spike Milligan, who ended up inviting her to stay the night with his wife and family. “So I’m there, spending the night at Spike Milligan’s house, with his family, with boxes of wine, wearing his wife’s nightie! I thought, that’s it – it’s never going to get any better than this.”
Patterson met Madonna when the singer was deep into her Earth mother/Kabbalah-phase. “I’d been passing out with nerves, and it was so strange to meet this hippy person. I was [looks perplexed]: ‘Where’s the fabulous Madonna?’ But it was still deeply interesting just to shake this tiny little hand, and say ‘You’re real’, because in the 80s, these people lived on plinths, they never came down to Earth.” This encounter made Patterson realise that celebrity per se didn’t exist. “You want them to be ‘other’, the great ones, but it’s not true, it’s a projection. We need them to be special, or we did – these days, people are more likely to denigrate, or dream of being Madonna’s best pal. We never dreamed of being Madonna’s best pal – we were happy for her to be up there in the rings of Saturn. All that has changed.”
Change is a key theme of the book, with specific focus on what Patterson calls “music journalism’s agonisingly slow death”. After a miserable-sounding apprenticeship at various publications for Dundee’s DC Thomson during the early to mid 1980s, Patterson found her spiritual home at Smash Hits, which, from her fond vivid recollections (electric typewriters, cigarette smoke, “Black Type”, “fright wigs”, “Chris De Bleurggh”), emerges as not just a magazine, rather a surrealist youth subculture with it’s own rules and language. Her book is dedicated to the “Spirit of ver Hits” – what was that? “A profound appreciation of the absurdity of life – an anarchy of absurdism. And this underlying thing of not allowing people to get away with taking themselves too seriously.”
Patterson attributes much of this spirit to the then deputy editor, the late, great Tom Hibbert, who died in 2011: “He was a vibration of mirth, if I can call a person that. He was a colossal influence not just on me, but on an entire generation.” To Patterson, the art of interviewing was all about finding the real person behind the facade of celebrity: “The extraordinarily famous, the enormously privileged, can be fairly obnoxious,” she says. “And it was just a really good laugh to try to get beyond that, and say – do you actually have a sense of humour? But you weren’t trying to destroy them – you were trying to bring out the best of them.”
One thing the book brings home is the astonishing amount of access pop stars used to give. Patterson agrees that it’s all much more controlled now, but she also wonders whether at times the media can be too negative, doomy, and sometimes downright nasty. “I understand that there should be balance,” she says. “But why is it only the negative side that everyone wants to know about? The pain, the breakdown, the bulimia, the suicide attempts. It’s all: ‘Let’s look at the darkness!’ There’s none of the irreverence, the celebratory… the fun stuff.”
Her book uses an interview with a guarded, stressed Lily Allen, circa 2014, as an example of how modern-day celebrities can be hounded across the media and social media. “I was able to contrast it with Lily, years before, when she was 21,” says Patterson. “Completely open and free, crying with laughter at how ridiculous she was, how much spliff she smoked, the chaos of her teenage life. That person was crushed and mauled.” She sees the same guardedness in artists such as Beyoncé (“No wonder Beyoncé doesn’t really do interviews any more. Why would she?”) and Adele: “Lovely Adele,” she says. “A force of nature, a funny personality, trying her hardest to have a hoot, and she gets destroyed for her quips and jokes [about paying a lot of tax in 2011]. And now she will do as few interviews as she can, and prefers an almost reclusive life, and I don’t blame her one bit.”
Does Patterson think that Smash Hits gave her a sense of family that may have been missing from her upbringing? She nods: “Absolutely, yes.” After her parents died (her father, James, in 1989, her mother, Rita, in 2004), Patterson remembers feeling like “an atom-sized person, which was unexpected, because I’d had this very non-close relationship with my mother”. Patterson’s family (her insurance accountant father, two sisters, and two brothers, one of whom – Ronnie, who had Down’s syndrome – died) was torn apart by her mother, formerly a psychiatric nurse, succumbing to alcoholism, in the late 70s, just as Patterson was entering her teens. Patterson says that she felt the most sympathy for her father, quietly droll, music-loving, a former Japanese POW. “Whatever happened to the woman he loved? And at least I could go out with my mates.”
Late in life, her mother sobered up, and Patterson is grateful they reconnected; she’s even glad that they got inebriated together one Christmas (Patterson stoned; her mum drunk). She includes a sweet stilted letter from her mum in the book (“I needed to give her a voice; I needed her to speak”), but clearly it’s still very raw. The only time during the interview that Patterson comes close to crying is when I say her mother must have been very proud of her.
When she was born, Patterson had a rare condition that meant she was missing a layer of skin, and the metaphor is blindingly obvious – does she regard herself as sensitive and emotional? “My best friends would be laughing their heads off right now!” she says. “Yes, I can lose it down the old overemotional boulevard quite a lot. It’s quite chaotic being me. But I’ve survived all these years, life has thrown a few things my way and I’ve coped.”
These included not only the deaths of family members, but also dear friends, and then there were her miscarriages. Happy and in love with fellow writer Simon Goddard, for almost 14 years now, Patterson feels she wasted “years and years!” on bad boyfriends. “Who hasn’t? But did it cost me the chance of becoming a mother? Maybe.” She’d never considered having children, but she was devastated by her miscarriages (one of which seemed grotesquely to be ongoing while she interviewed Mariah Carey, sitting in matching massage chairs having their backs pummelled). Now Patterson is angry on behalf of other women about how society relegates the topic of miscarriage to “the shadows”, but she’s happy to be involved with her friends’ kids (“I get to be edgy Auntie Sylv”), and tries to be philosophical. “Life’s hardcore,” she says. “It’s hardcore being a grown-up.”
There were also financial pressures, maddening flatmates, and constant moves between short-term lets. Patterson was thankful when the modest inheritance from her parents meant that she could put down a deposit on a permanent home: “It’s a one-bedroom flat on a housing estate, and I’m kissing the walls! ”
One problem was that the world of music journalism, as Patterson and I knew it, as a vital taste-making cultural force, in predominantly physical as opposed to online form, encompassing myriad titles, papers and magazines, requiring a shelf to itself in national newsagents, was vanishing, with even key publications struggling to survive. Smash Hits folded in 2006, long after Patterson had departed to contribute to titles including Q, the Word, the Guardian, Glamour, Interview, the Face, and the NME prior to it becoming a free paper. The latter was disillusioning for Patterson, a lifelong indie music fan, especially when the paper published what she terms a “tits ’n’ cocaine” cover for a feature on the Miami scene. The book includes a magnificently scathing 2001 resignation email to the NME, railing against sexism, “shite tunes” and pandering to the lowest common denominator – but she forgot to press “send”.
It was while covering the Reading music festival, in 1999, somewhat “under the influence”, that she fell, seriously injuring her arm. “I felt like such a schmuck! It was like that for months” – she holds her hand out limply. Writing about the subsequent threat of amputation, Patterson jokes about fearing becoming “the one-armed drummer out of Def Leppard of music journalism”, but it sounds horrific, and Patterson says that she never took “class As” again.
There’s no shortage of drugs (including skunk, ecstasy and ketamine) in I’m Not With the Band, though that’s inevitable when writing about a music scene that normalised them, to the point where Patterson writes that she “accidentally” took heroin. “It was these Es [ecstasy] cut with really strong smack,” she says. “People were saying the next day – ‘Who took that smack-y E?’” She also ended up in a “K-hole” (ketamine-induced stupor): “It just feels like ‘the Fear’,” she says. “Just imagine the most paranoid and vulnerable you’ve ever felt in your life.” In retrospect, Patterson thinks she had far too many insecurities to do drugs. “There’s probably a whole life I can’t remember,” she says. “Being in weird houses, where am I? Who is this? What am I saying?” These days, she only smokes dope occasionally “and it’s never a good idea”.
I tell Patterson that there were times reading I’m Not With the Band when I wondered if pop had ruined her life? She laughs: “There was a book by Zodiac Mindwarp called Fucked by Rock. Well, I’ve been ‘fucked by pop’, to be honest.” Is there anything she’d change about her life? “A bit more common sense perhaps?” She says in her book that life has been “emotional, psychological and professional pandemonium”, but she also feels she chose her precarious existence because she valued freedom above all else… and besides, what a blast. “The young people that one speaks to,” she writes, “they’re agog that you spent a day on a bus with Beyoncé, they’re thrilled that you had an encounter with Eminem, they think it’s absolutely insane that you met Madonna.” “Just all those freedoms,” says Patterson, marvelling afresh. “Those creative joys. And I got to be there!”
I’m Not With the Band is published by Sphere (£18.99). Click here to order a copy for £15.19
This article was amended on 13 June 2016 to correct the name of the town in which publisher DC Thomson is based.
