Tommy Udo Interview
Tommy Udo has worked on just about every major UK music magazine of the past 30 years. He is also an author of non-fiction books and novels. He currently freelancers and is working on a new novel about comas.
Can you give me a brief history of your writing career so far?
I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. Won various short story competitions as a kid, had stuff published in Science Fiction fanzines and pro-mags (Asimov’s If, F & SF) and anthologies in my teens and 20s. Most of it was bilge and I wince at the thought of it… From SF fanzines, I moved into music ‘zines. Edited my own early punk mag called Carbomb. This was around 1976. Went into ‘proper’ journalism after university in 1981. Worked on Scottish local papers reporting on everything from planning permission being refused for new park benches to grisly murders. Well, I reported on one grisly murder - a drunken farmer murdered a drunken prostitute with a scythe. Once got a scoop on a former Nazi war criminal who was living under a false identity in Glasgow. Actually if I’m honest it was my only big scoop.
It was a weird time; the paper I worked on was produced the way that newspapers had been produced for nearly 150 years, just before the introduction of new technology, so the pages were pasted up on upright wooden benches, there was a constant clacking of typewriters, you had a copy boy who took stuff from your desk to be typeset, and you worked in grim nicotine-coloured rooms full of old men coughing and smoking and eating corned beef and spam sandwiches. It was like the 1950s had never ended. It was the very end of that era. I learned many now-useless skills like 'casting-off' copy, stuff that computers just made melt away. And good fucking riddance too.
Also did freelance music journalism; started working for now defunct weekly Sounds around 1982, worked for various glossy style mags throughout 80s - The Face, Blitz, Cut, 20/20, iD - most of which are now gone, which is quite depressing. I was writing about music mostly; there was a pretty vibrant post-punk scene in Glasgow and Edinburgh at the time. I also rediscovered metal around the middle of the decade - I had been a bit sniffy about NWOBHM (although I quite liked Iron Maiden) but hearing and seeing Metallica, Slayer et al was like a diamond shot into my skull, a Damascene conversion. It was also a great time for hardcore and post-hardcore bands like Husker Du, the Butthole Surfers and the Meat Puppets, so there was a lot to write about. It wasn’t all Rick Astley and Wham! y’know…
Moved to London in 1988, worked as Music Editor for City Limits - a lefty Time Out now, you’ve guessed it, defunct - then had a full time job at Sounds (until it folded in 1991). Then a period of freelancing on various Fleet Street papers (when they were still in Fleet Street) and mags until I got a job as News Editor at NME in 1994. Started the week before Kurt Cobain topped himself. Worked there for five years, in that time also did TV show Film Night on Channel 4, wrote a few books - quickie on industrial music called Cyberpunk, now long out of print, and contributed to a book on Japanese director/actor ’Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, still, I believe the only one in English. Left NME in 1999 to launch Xfm’s website - a disastrous move as it happens - was made redundant the following year, went back to freelancing. Worked for Bizarre, Metal Hammer, also wrote book on Nu Metal for Sanctuary followed by Charles Manson quickie and Nine Inch Nails book. Also co-wrote a Metallica book with Metal Hammer editor Chris Ingham. Currently freelance and available at reasonable rates, no job too small.
How many books have you written?
Eight to date not including my unpublished - and possibly unpublishable - masterpiece When Hell Attacks. Four as far as I know are currently still in print earning me at least a tenner a year in royalties.
Which one was the hardest to write?
None of them were particularly hard though I suppose Brave Nu World, the nu metal book, was a real chore because it was mostly just such hackwork. Other than Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Tool - who /weren’t/aren’t nu metal bands anyway, the publishers wanted them to be included - I wasn’t really that interested in the bulk of the artists that had to be covered in the book and in fact very few of them really had anything of any great interest to say. Papa Roach for example were, to be frank, like tapeworms with a record deal. So it was a struggle making something from the dull and inarticulate observations of bands whose music I was then starting to find horribly pointless and derivative. It was doubly frustrating because at this time I kept hearing music that excited me, that I really wanted to write about - Emperor and Opeth for example - but I was forced to go and churn out stuff on Godsmack. I should point out that I don’t hate nu metal - I still genuinely like a lot of unfashionable mainstream metal bands like Staind and Limp Bizkit for the same reasons that I once liked Slade and Black Sabbath - but by the time I was writing about it, nu metal was already to all intents and purposes, dead. So that was hard to write in the sense that it was done without any great enthusiasm; I actually considered buying back the contract at one point but had already pissed away all of the money. Everything else I’ve done has been something that I actively wanted to do, particularly the Nine Inch Nails one, so they’ve flowed pretty easily. As to whether they’re any good or not…
Tell me about your book Vatican Bloodbath:
It was a true story about the war between the Vatican and the British royal family cunningly disguised as a wilfully pornographic quasi-experimental novel. It’s an anti-Royalist anti-Christian rant full of scatological obscenity, cannibalism and perversion inspired by the genius that is Lyndon LaRouche (Google the cunt, he‘s funny). The publisher stood at the entrance to the House of Commons handing out copies to the most psycho right wing Tory MPs and Lords he could spot to try and whip up some controversy. The cover, I should add, is miles better than the book itself. Recently some fool paid £45 for a copy on eBay.
Which book was the most successful?
They were all flops. Nine Inch Nails made back the advance so in that sense I suppose it was the most successful. I hope my most successful book is the next one I write.
Who has given you the most difficult interview?
Hard to say. Rammstein was a difficult one because it was done through an interpreter. I almost decked one of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs because they were being snide about every question I asked. Not sure why. Sonic Youth were a bunch of cunts. But the really difficult interviews are the ones where you seem to be getting on great guns with the subject but when you listen back to the tape, you realise that they haven’t actually told you anything that you needed to know. I always approach an interview like a news story and aim to get something from the interviewee that s/he hasn’t told anyone else. This is difficult because of the production-line nature of interviews these days and the fact that there is just so much in the way of magazines, radio, TV etc. You usually get half an hour to an hour in a hotel room and depending on who you’re working for, you may be first in line or last. The artist has a spiel that they’ve trotted out all day regardless of the questions. These days they are often coached by PR professionals. It’s much more of a challenge, then, to get something else from them. I once did an interview with Aerosmith that was completely unusable because they successfully, and very charmingly, evaded every question I threw at them and to my shame I never noticed until I listened back to the tape. I once did what I thought was a fantastic interview with Kurt Cobain but I was so off my face on booze and tranquilisers that what I did was asked him the same three anodyne questions over and over again. That was hardly a difficult interview, though it was a bloody hard piece to write.
And the most enjoyable?
Not music related. In 1995 I interviewed the US crime writer James Ellroy for NME. I’ve been a massive fan since I read The Black Dahlia in the late 80s and this was around the publication of American Tabloid. Anyway, I turned up and some public schoolboy from The Times was just leaving, complaining to the PR about how difficult he’d been. The PR apologised in advance, saying that James was in a pissy mood. So I went in, a bit nervous, and the first thing he said was: “Thank Christ, somebody dressed like an adult.” I was a big suit and tie man in those days. Then I asked him about the Protestant themes in his LA Quartet which he expounded on without interruption for nearly 40 minutes. Then the interview went brilliantly to the point where he had me wait after my time was up, came down to the shop with me until I bought more cassettes (the 90s, remember?) and then sat in a bar for another two hours talking about the Kennedy assassination, “fucking Bill Clinton” and his life as a panty-sniffer and petty thief (years before the confessional My Dark Places was published). Unfortunately this was for a 650 word piece, so it was kind of hard to cram nearly three hours and change of this fantastic interview in.
The most enjoyable music related interview was with Phil Lynott in the early 80s. It lasted three days and many many drinks. Can’t remember a great deal about it though…
What are your favourite rock books?
I think they’re all cock and I would never read one for pleasure. I really only like books that don’t bore me with details about recording albums and what amps they used. I really hate the existence of list-books with a passion and am not keen on ‘guides‘…you know, ‘Doom Metal For Idiots’ sort of shit with fatuous alphabetical entries on each band. I suppose my favourite rock books are The Tale Of Willy’s Rats And Give The Anarchist A Cigarette by Mick Farren. I also think that Stewart Home’s Cranked Up Really High is the best book on punk ever written. Recently quite enjoyed Michael Bracewell’s book about Roxy Music and Psychic Confusion, Stevie Chick’s excellent tome on Sonic Youth. They’re all exceptions to the tons of dross churned out by joyless bedroom-dwelling sexless pedants who can make the most thrilling artists dull.
Who are your favourite writers?
James Ellroy, Dostoyevsky, Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, William Gibson, Robert Louis Stevenson. I love a lot of modern UK hard SF by the likes of Ken McLeod, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan and Stephen Baxter. Science Fiction is the only popular literature that really engages with the important ideas of our time. Among my contemporaries I greatly admire Cathi Unsworth, Steven Wells, Ben Myers, Luke Sutherland and Stewart Home, who have all been huge influences upon me.
Which books have you read recently which you’d recommend?
William Gibson’s Spook Country is phenomenal. Books that have made a big impact on me that I’d recommend that everyone reads are Black Mass by John Gray and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In fact, any book with ‘Black’ in the title…
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Stop aspiring and write.
And make sure you get paid.
Do you have any opinions on contemporary music writing? Compared to, say, the seventies with magazines like Sounds and Melody Maker.
I hate ‘golden ageism’, the idea that things were always better back in the day. There’s a lot of that around at the moment. Snide broadsheet attacks on the NME, usually repeating a lot of clichés about how it was all so much better back in the 70s, 80s, whenever. It wasn’t. When I worked at NME I was able to go back through the archives and see how lame the paper really was during its supposed golden age in the 70s. Even writers like St Nick Kent were capable of turning out wrong wrong wrong wince-inducing shit as often as they delivered something brilliant. I think the advantage that writers had then were the existence of publications that were influenced by the experimental underground press of the 60s, who weren’t quite tamed by marketing departments. There was a lot of room to experiment. Also, there was a lot more access to bands and artists, music wasn’t ‘PRed’ to death the way it is today. I mean, it’s inevitable simply because there are so many more outlets covering music, but it does have a detrimental effect on the way that journalists work. When I started writing about music, I used to spend a lot more time hanging around with the subject, even big names like The Who for example, before even turning the tape recorder on. Today, it’s the aforementioned 30 minute interview by numbers with the PR breathing down your neck. That means that the sort of writing you do about an artist has to be different. Worse, I think.
I think that there are a lot of really good writers around at the moment - James McMahon, Tim Jonze and others at NME for example - and they are working within constraints that seem designed to strangle all creativity and wit from their writing. But they still manage to let it shine through. I particularly hate the 50 word review, the 500 word feature; it’s like trying to explain complex concepts using smoke signals. And that isn’t anything against the NME; it’s a much wider malaise in the press, where everything as delivered as glorified picture captions because publishers sincerely believe that their readers are too stupid to understand anything other than pictographs and lists. I had high hopes for the web but don’t really see anything too challenging emerging there. I remember sitting in a meeting when I was at Xfm doing their website and somebody from the marketing department said in all seriousness "Do we really need to use words in album reviews?" They wanted them just to be a bunch of symbols; thumbs-ups, stars, that kind of shit. That’s what writers today are up against.
Also, I think the whole history of popular music has become like a dead weight on its progress. We seem to be caught in a cycle of perpetual nostalgia. There are very few artists that I hear doing something that isn’t a minor variant of something else from the past yet I do think that there is a really fascinating and exciting underground, everything from Dubstep to post-black metal, millions of constantly shifting microscenes and temporary genres. Yet a lot of journalists are only interested in covering the deadest, lamest bowl haircut white-student ‘indie’ shit. I’m nearly 50 and the last thing I want to hear are a bunch of 70s revivalist cabaret cunts like Kings Of Leon churning out shit that was already old when I was a wee boy. Yet there they go, shit being lapped up like its custard.
What also worries me most is that I think a lot of younger writers are too fucking reverential - to the artists they write about and to other (older) writers/editors. I don’t sense the anger that I would expect from younger writers: don’t they feel like they have a fucking albatross around their necks? Aren’t they sick of this perpetual nostalgia, 60s 70s and 80s haircuts and music perpetually on loop? Punk revivals still being seen as signs of rebellion? C’mon, have a pop for Christ’s sake!
What are your 10 Desert Island Discs?
Today they are A Tribute To Jack Johnson - Miles Davis; Ascension - John Coltrane; The Blue Garden - Masters Of Reality; Master Of Reality - Black Sabbath; The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter - The Incredible String Band; The Spotlight Kid - Captain Beefheart; Deloused In The Comatorium - The Mars Volta; Explosive Dub - King Tubby; Dubstep Allstars Volume 1 - Various; Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits
Do you make a living from writing?
I make a living from journalism. Not a great living, I hasten to add, and I’m seriously thinking of retraining to do something else like plumbing or IT. I have a family now and I don’t see a great future for professional journalism in the coming years and I believe that it will be harder if not impossible to make a living the way I do at the moment. Writing and writers are not valued by publishers and the web is helping to de-professionalise journalism. I’ll continue to write, but it won’t be my main income stream.
Are you working on any new projects?
Last year I was hospitalised after falling six storeys from a window. I was pretty fucked up, in a coma for a month which was a strange experience. So now I’m working on a book about comas, about my own experience but also about the way that comas are used as a plot device in films like Vanilla Sky, TV shows like Life On Mars and novels like Irvine Welch’s Marabou Stork Nightmares.
Interview by Neil Daniels 2008
