An Interview With Miranda Sawyer: Neither Out of Touch Nor Out Of Time

The first funny thing about ageing is the way it sneaks up on you.
One moment, you’re in your twenties, and within the blink of an eye, ten years have gone by. The second funny thing is that the added years don’t necessarily make you feel differently – you don’t feel any more mature or sensible or have a sudden desire to spend your evenings darning socks. Journalist Miranda Sawyer’s book Out of Time is subtitled “Mid-Life, If You Still Think You’re Young” and it explores the realisation that you’re no longer a whippersnapper despite feeling that way.
Sawyer has spent her life and career immersed in youth culture. Her first job was writing about pop music for the now-defunct Smash Hits magazine.
“I applied, but I didn’t know how to apply because I had no experience so I just wrote a letter in the style of Smash Hits,” she recalls. “The really weird thing was that it got read at all – that office was a mess. They asked me in for a couple of days work. I think I got employed because I was quite close in age to the reader. I was a reader. During the interview the editor told me that Elton John was number one and asked if they should put him on the cover. I said, ‘No, you should put Brother Beyond on the cover.’ Because he had literally just done that, they gave me a chance and I just kept turning up.”
Out of Time seems to have hit a chord – according to Amazon it is, paradoxically, a bestseller in both their humour and cultural studies charts – but was Sawyer worried that her book about a midlife crisis would be dismissed as a middle-class, first world problem?
“Of course it is a first world problem!” she laughs. “If you’re middle-aged and it is a bit of a shock to you, that obviously is a first world problem, but it can be difficult. I live in the first world and so do the people I am writing for. But just because something is a first world problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Most writing that comes from the first world and is about feelings can be dismissed. I’m not writing about escaping from Syria, I’m not writing about survival, or my husband being eaten by a bear, or being shot by my partner. I am writing about terribly ordinary, everyday life.”
If today’s middle–aged people feel pushed to the margins, they may have themselves to blame, she says.
“I think part of the problems around the idea of ageing are caused by the people who are now middle-aged,” muses Sawyer, “because we had a very successful era of youth culture in the ’90s. There was a big selling of alternative culture, of taking over, of people going, ‘This is how we want life to be, we want it to be full of interesting, alternative people doing interesting alternative things because this is what will attract visitors to our country.’ That was true to a certain extent. Then you get old, and the culture you’ve established is harder for you to maintain.”
Sawyer believes that today’s youth culture, and the music and tribes that go with it, is as vibrant as it ever was, but it is less visible because the way we consume media has changed.
“Because of the internet, music is distributed in a different way, but there is still a massive love of music in our culture,” she says. “People like to go to festivals and see all kinds of different things rather than staying in a niche. There have been definite musical movements, but quite often the people in those movements don’t want you to write about them. Grime is a classic example. I could write reams about Skepta and Jme, but they don’t want to be interviewed. And a lot of the magazines where you would write about bands no longer exist. Writing about youth culture creates youth culture because it makes a record. If those outlets have disappeared then there isn’t an official journal of record.”
What has not changed however, is that a band’s credibility is largely dependent on who they appeal to – and young male fans are still seen as more serious music lovers than young female ones. “Look at the career of a band like Blur for example,” argues Sawyer. “When Blur had indie male fans they were seen as credible, and when they went into the mainstream and had lots of young girl fans they were seen as not credible, although that’s when they made their money and their name. The only way to get credible again is to make music to make sure the young female fans desert them. Then they can go back to being the delight of alternative male fans. Credibility is associated with chin-scratching male fans. There is an idea that you’re selling out if you sell lots of records and I don’t agree with that.”
In twenty years of interviewing musos and bands, what has been her strangest or most uncomfortable encounter?
“Jon Bon Jovi! He is notoriously tricky. I interviewed him for The Observer and it went really badly. He wasn’t interested in any of the questions I asked him, and I wasn’t interested in any of the answers he was giving. It just wasn’t working. When the PR came in to say there was only ten minutes left, we both said, ‘Nah, I think we’re done.’”
While Out of Time may be an elegy to the indignities of fleeting youth, music still has the power to excite and thrill, and to, as Sawyer says, get you out of your head and out of time.
“I find in middle age what I am looking for is something that changes my head for a bit. Most of adult life is quite boring. In order to get through that I need something to get me out of it. You can’t drink all the time, and I can’t take drugs because I don’t want to have to deal with the weeklong existential crisis of a hangover. But I want to get out of time for a while. Running does that; I run for the serotonin, but I get that also from music.
“I went to see Skepta and Jme with my son. He’s ten and so he’s far too young for that gig, and I’m far too old, but that’s fine. It didn’t bother me that I was the wrong age, and he was the wrong age – if you’re really into it, it’s fine. That gig was completely brilliant, it was really, really good. Afterwards we ran all the way up the hill home. We had the best time, we had a transcendental time.”

Out Of Time is published by Fourth Estate