Book Review: Ted Kessler - Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed The British Music Press And Other Adventures

Anyone who works next or near a music publication will read the first chapter detailing the sad demise of Q magazine, a victim to both market forces and the pandemic, of this biography with a grimace. I know and you know and everyone else knows that the glory days, in terms of sales at least, of music journalism are in the past - because the internet killed everything that was good and beautiful in the world, etc. - but there was a time when it wasn't enough to hastily copy and paste the latest press release and call it art. There was an era when humour, intellectual rigour, emotion, and the odd boot were applied to the important business of bullshitting about music. It was a belle époque of which little now remains, apart from the august cultural periodical, which recently celebrated its forty-fifth year of service, that you currently peruse. I'm generalising, of course I am. There is still worthy music writing out there - and Kessler's shoulder is to the wheel with his New Cue newsletter - but there's no denying the landscape has changed.

Kessler was Q’s last editor, a position he attained after a gradual ascent through the ranks of music journalism, staring small before getting in to Select and then his glory days with the NME. If you've read his work in the aforementioned publications -and they're all more or less extinct now - you already know Kessler can write and he proves it again here, documenting his early nomadic life between London and Paris and then his adventures in pop. Unusually for this type of book the formative years before all the stars arrive are just as entertaining as the section marbled with the marquee names.

He’s asked by Mark E. Smith if his surname denotes “Jew or Nazi”, an anecdote Kessler’s father incredulously repeats for years. He's seriously consulted by Paul Weller himself, is in the thick of it - which seems like great sport altogether - for the rise of Oasis, and goes to Cuba with both Happy Mondays and Manic Street Preachers. Imagine there was a time when music journos went on jolly-ups to Cuba! Imagine! Editorial genius and spiritual guru Stuart Clark has, on more than one occasion, told tales of such bygone wonders as I and other youngsters sat rapt in awe at his feet.

Kessler also very nearly writes the definitive Kevin Rowland book, and witnesses the crucial first nine months of The Strokes, who he reckons saved the NME in 2001. Endearingly, he never hesitates to marvel at his own good fortune at being there when it happened, and even manages to appear genuinely happy and proud when his brother has the cheek to go off and become a rock star - Daniel, guitarist with Interpol - rather than snipe at him as the rest of us might. And I haven't even told you about Paul Heaton and how he reacted to Q's doors closing. I'll never hear another word said against him.

For all the hard work from Kessler and his colleagues, sales go through the floor and no amount of corporate overlord meddling or marketing bullshit can bring them back. Inevitable redundancy prompts our man to dust himself off and write this fascinating and exceptionally well-told story. Despite the blows, Paper Cuts celebrates a glorious time and does so in worthy fashion.