LICHFIELD INTERROGATES: Alex Niven

Alex Niven is a left-wing writer and blogger. His first book, 'Folk Opposition', which talked about a proposed resurgence in folk culture whilst tackling the ideals of the modern Conservative Party, was published in 2011. He has written for The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the academic journal ELH: English Literary History to name but a few. His own blog, 'The Fantastic Hope' features his viewpoints on politics, music, society and his beloved Newcastle United. I've known Alex for four years now, having first met him when he was in Everything Everything and have collaborated with him on quite a few things over the last couple of years. I caught up with him to talk writing, the internet, the North East, Mumford & Sons (inevitably), the state of the opposition and various other topics of that ilk. 

Hi Alex, how’s the writing going? What are you currently working on?

It’s not going too bad Dave. I finished a PhD a few weeks ago and handed in the final draft of a book about Oasis’s Definitely Maybe last week. It’s quite a nice time, the interlude after you’ve just finished a big project. I’m starting to think about the next thing, which is probably going to be a book about 21^st century music culture, perhaps a collection of essays.

Have you always wanted to write for a living?

I suppose I always had a sense of what sort of cultural space or environment I wanted to be in. In terms of writing per se, I’m not sure I’ve made my mind up about it, even now. I’m drawn to what I do at the moment – which I suppose is something like creative non-fiction or cultural analysis – because it seems like the only game in town. So many of the other artistic genres, from the novel to the pop song to the academic monograph, are in a pretty bad way right now – they’ve lost their energy and social impetus. Conversely, the creative people I really admire, people like Owen Hatherley and Mark Fisher, are saying the really vital, interesting things in the form of essays and blogposts and non-fiction books. It seems like this is the form with the most cultural potential at this point in history.

Some of your work - ‘Folk Opposition’ in particular talks of a slow shift back to the sense of community which the 1980s UK government have been charged with dismantling. Do you think that we have got anywhere nearer that goal in the two years since it was published?

No not at all, things have continued to get worse in the last two years in a way that has been quite scary. The main reason for this is obviously that there has been no organised political response to the radical right-wing agenda being pushed by the coalition. In advocating community in Folk Opposition, I wasn’t saying that everyone should get together in their local town hall and sing songs and hold hands – that was the kind of Cameronite Big-Society fantasy I was trying to criticise. What Folk Opposition calls for is a powerful, organised, collective culture that goes from the micro to the macro level. There have been scattered signs of activity at the grassroots over the last two years, most obviously the Occupy movement, but the problem is that there have been few attempts to turn this local activity into a bigger organised entity, a larger-scale “community” if you like. Having said that, I’m encouraged by things like the People’s Assembly.

What are your feelings towards the internet and humanity – do you think it does more harm than good? Would you miss it if it disappeared?

I think generally I subscribe to the view that technology is more-or-less neutral, that it can be put to negative or positive uses depending on the society. At the moment, the internet tends to reflect the radical individualism of neoliberal society – it helps to isolate us and keep us locked up in the private sphere. But it’s not the internet itself that imprisons us in the home. We only use the internet in this way because wider political forces have removed social experience from us. Neoliberalism has removed jobs, community, union, democratic participation etc, so people have been forced to retreat into privacy. But the internet has an alternative potential to socialise us – to allow people to meet, discuss, debate, subvert, organise – and you see this in glimpses now and again. The internet is like any other medium, it’s dependent on its society and it just so happens that we have a pretty terrible one right now.

Has music become cheapened by the way that the majority of us now consume it?

Again, yes and no. In the neoliberal society we live in, new technologies have emphasised a neoliberal culture of atomisation, privacy, abundance of consumer goods, and so on. So yes, music has been cheapened to a horrifying extent over the last thirty years. But it’s the society that’s doing it rather than the medium of Spotify or YouTube or whatever.

Far-right politics have become increasingly prominent within the UK in the last few years. Do you think this is purely because the relevant groups have been given the oxygen of publicity, or it this a direct result of ‘divide-and-rule’ and scapegoating tactics being used by the mass media in conjunction with the government?

The most obvious reason for the far-right resurgence in recent years seems to me to be the continuing abandonment of the working-class by the mainstream political parties. When people don’t feel represented over a long period of time and their economic situation is worsening they do all kinds of terrible things, one of which is turn to right-wing idiots who seem to offer them an explanation and an alternative.

For those who are unfamiliar with your work, can you give a brief explanation of your disdain for nu-folk acts such as Mumford and Sons?

Nu-folk is a (very largely) upper-middle-class genre that attempts to hijack the culture of the working-class and turn it into a medieval fantasy. It’s posh people dressing up as peasants, basically, and at a time when in political terms the posh people are shafting the proletariat, there seems to be something very sinister about this. And musically it’s fucking terrible. It’s like Downton Abbey – I watched it once thinking I would hate it for political reasons but I just found it incredibly boring. I actually love folk music and grew up playing it, so when I hear something like Mumford and Sons it just seems so fake and dull, and detached from the sort of contexts that make folk music such a powerful form of music. Folk music is rebel music, or should be.

Why do you think Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ failed so spectacularly?

It was a soundbite, nothing more.

Do you think articulate and talented young working-class people now face more stumbling blocks than ever?

Yes, of course they do, because the whole movement of British politics over the last thirty years has been to remove the forms of empowerment that allowed talented working-class people to express themselves in the past – social security, free higher education, a flourishing state broadcasting system.

Please outline what you think are the main problems with the state of UK democracy in 2013.

The main problem is the lack of mainstream representation for a vast majority of the population. Fewer and fewer people vote, and when they do there’s very little correlation between who they vote for and what they actually believe in, so I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that democracy doesn’t really exist in Britain right now. Democracy isn’t just a case of the right to vote, it has to be supported by a democratic infrastructure – unionisation, education, differentiated political parties – and we just don’t have this right now.

Do you feel that the North East is a particularly hard-hit victim of the North-South divide? If this is so, have you found it to always have been this way in your studies and experience or has the situation become worse than ever? What needs to be done to rectify this?

Yes I don’t think anybody could really dispute that the north-east is one of the most badly damaged areas in the country. It hasn’t always been this way – obviously the making of the north-east was the industrial revolution, and that was its means of empowerment for a century or two. After de-industrialisation it’s suffered, but this has been exacerbated by the neoliberal policies of the last thirty years. There could have been new industries and new forms of cultural empowerment put into in the north-east, but successive Prime Ministers from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron have sought to divert power and wealth to London and the south-east instead.

Would you ever consider picking up a guitar in public ever again?

Yeah of course. But the culture of British pop music is so fundamentally fucked right now that it might have to wait a few years. There’s also a more specific problem in that I think the potential of the guitar has been mostly used up over the past few decades. It’s very hard to be innovative with the guitar at this moment in time – it might have to go into hiding for a few years.

What has kept you going in terms of music, books, films and literature over the last few years?

As I said in the first question, the only people who have really inspired me are people on the blogosphere, writers like Owen Hatherley, Carl Neville, Mark Fisher, Nina Power, Joe Kennedy, all of whom have written cracking books too. Musically it’s mostly been isolated pop stuff that has excited me: Lana Del Rey, Rihanna, Robyn, Nicki Minaj, that sort of thing.

And finally – do you think the Labour Party has now been tarnished irredeemably and if so, can you see a genuine alternative to them becoming a major force in UK politics?

I wouldn’t vote for Labour in its current form because it’s obviously still extremely right-wing, but I still have some hope it might rediscover its soul. It’s poised on a knife edge – if the anti-union reforms go ahead then there really will be nothing left of Labour’s core identity. On the other hand, if the Blairites go quietly into the night then there are signs of a new generation coming through that could reverse Labour’s rightward drift. I have a lot of time for people like Owen Jones and if he’s a sign of where Labour might be heading then that’s something to be optimistic about.

Thanks, Alex Niven - Alex left us 18 of his current earworms below. We're already huge on tracks 2, 4, 5, 7, 16 and 17 here. Tuck in, lads!

LICHFIELD INTERROGATES: Matt Hall of Take That tribute act Rule The World

Hard to believe I know, but I managed to get to the age of 30 without ever seeing what I would consider to be a genuine tribute act, but this all changed a few weeks ago when I encountered the monumentally accurate force that is Rule The World - a surely unsurpassable touring Take That tribute performing just a couple of miles down the road in Piercebridge. Despite my modest expectations, I'm not exaggerating when I say they blew the roof off the place (metaphor). As a fervent admirer of the real Take That and a repeated viewer of their frankly stunning performance on the 'Progress Live' DVD, they certainly had a lot to live up to, and as the electrifying set progressed (pun), more and more queries began to form in my mind, as I frantically tried to think of a way of remembering them. Luckily I got hold of them through a social networking site to ask for an interview and they agreed. In my drunken stupor I had convinced myself this was a brilliant idea, and it turns out I was right. 

I caught up with Matt Hall - Mark Owen in the show - to ask him about life in a frankly fantastic, eerily convincing tribute act.

First things first, how was the act put together? How long have you been on the circuit?

We all auditioned to be in the band. I think that’s the key to the success of our tribute band – we weren’t all mates beforehand who could sing and decided to be a tribute because we could earn money. We were picked. We had to prove that we would be good enough for this job. We had to prove we were better than the competition! The band started in 2007 but the only original member is Dan Maines (Gary Barlow). I joined in 2009 and Joe (Jason Orange) joined soon after. Dom is our newest member and he joined the band only last year – September 2012.

There must be a great deal of theatrical skill involved, are you all from an acting background?

Yes I guess there is. I’ve been performing since I was 8 years old! Growing up I was in many theatre productions and at 15 was lucky enough to start getting jobs professionally as an actor. I’ve appeared in leading roles in ‘Heartbeat’, ‘The Royal’ and ‘Unforgiven’. 

Dan is a musician through and through. Before becoming Gary Barlow he was working as a professional singer. He can play piano, drums and guitar to name just a few instruments. Joe is an amazing dancer and had years of training in dance as well as taking lessons in singing and acting too. Dom is also an amazing performer with years of experience. He’s appeared in countless musical theatre productions and has trained at various schools etc. So yes, we all have a strong background in performing. We’re all professionals and it’s an approach we all adopt when being in this band. 

Many people mistake our job as just being singers who can move a bit. But it’s so much more than that! You have to be able to command a stage and work the crowd but you also have to do it in a way your “character” would. When you dance you must interpret the moves in a similar way to your character, when you sing you must sound like them and even when you’re just standing or talking it must be in the way they would. It’s very much a case of playing a role. There’s a great deal of acting.

Are there any special techniques involved in sounding so much like the singers that you perform as – both in terms of singing and speaking?

I’m not sure! Being able to listen? Listen a little more carefully perhaps than others would to help pick out the minor details in a person’s voice, and then being able to mimic sounds and tones. It’s not easy for a lot of people I suppose. Some people can naturally do this much more. I spent months and months listening to the Take That DVDs, CDs and interviews over and over. Each phrase, each word, each sound. It was a big job. I guess I almost obsessed about it. I felt a duty to be as close to Mark Owen as I could. Now I get people talking to me after the show saying I’m still talking like him off stage! So I guess it comes naturally now and sometime it’s hard to snap out of!

Are you actually from the Manchester area yourselves - or are the accents part of the performance?

Dan is from Stockport so although he adapts his voice to the style of Gary, his natural accent is similar. The rest of us aren’t from Manchester so the accents are put on for performance.

How did you learn the mannerisms of the band members?

I took a very “actors” type approach to it. I very much saw Mark as a part to play. I thought about his age, his personality and what makes him likeable. Why do his fans love him? I studied his stance and his movements for long periods of time. I’d watch it, then try it out, then watch it again and see if it was right.

 

Are you big Take That fans yourselves? Did you listen to them growing up? Have you seen them live?

No. I knew of them and I’d heard their songs. But that was it. It’s safe to say on behalf of all four of us that none of us were fans beforehand. But we sure are now. After spending so many hours studying them it’s hard not to become a fan of their infectious feelgood hits.

Have any of you met the band members?

No! Unfortunately not! We would love to. Gary Barlow sent us a tweet on Twitter about the band. That’s as close as we got. Also, Jason’s mum came to see our show at Manchester Palace Theatre and she came to speak to us at the end. She told us she thoroughly enjoyed it and gave us all individual feedback. I remember she said to me if Mark is ever ill she’ll tell the boys to get me on stage because I was so like him. Wouldn’t that be nice! She told us she was going to ring Jason and tell him how amazing we all were!

Have any members of TT seen your show? Did you receive any feedback?

Gary Barlow saw a video of us on YouTube. We then tweeted him asking if he thought we were any good and he simply replied with one word - “Brilliant”. That was all he needed to say – recognition from the big man himself that we’re doing ok. I guess it’s just nice to know that he doesn’t think we’re rubbish or even worse that he’s not offended by us. Just the word “Brilliant” was enough to know that he approves of what we do and that he thinks it’s good.

What did you think about Robbie re-joining? Did you have to adapt your act?

I loved the idea. I knew it’d shake things up for us as a band regarding how the show would need to adapt to acknowledge his return. It was a brilliant end to their 20-year history to see them back on stage touring together again.

Are you planning on continuing as a four-piece or will you be incorporating Robbie?

We really don’t know. When Rob first re-joined the band our first approach was to find the very best Robbie solo tribute act that is already working out and do a few one off shows with him. We thought that if it works then we would maybe incorporate them into our show full time. However, due to them being so busy with solo bookings it wasn’t possible for them to join us full time and we would never want a mediocre Robbie in our band. He has a big job to do! At the moment it works where we’re a 4-piece band with the option of working with a top “Robbie” tribute on a few special gigs. It works really well this way. As for the future though I don’t know if this is how we’ll continue. If Take That releases their next album as a 5 piece again that changes things somewhat. We might be looking for a full time Robbie! We’ll have to wait and see what happens!

Do you still do any singing/acting outside of the act?

Yes I do! I’m still very busy taking acting lessons with an amazing tutor David Johnson. For now I’m very happy being a part of ‘Rule The World’, but there will come a time when it feels right to move onto other things – and that’s exciting. As an actor you want to challenge yourself with different roles and become different people who live different lives to you. That’s part of the fun of being an actor! But for now I’m very happy being Mark Owen.

Were the harmonies/dance routines difficult to work out?

Fortunately Dan has an amazing ear for harmonies and we had a brilliant choreographer Gary Lloyd (Thriller Live) who along with his amazing assistant Pilli Lopez did the rest.

Have the DVDs come in useful?

Yes hugely! We must have each watched every DVD over 1000 times!

How would you compare life in a tribute act compared to life in a conventional group?

If you’re in a tribute band you don’t have the worry of playing your own songs to an audience that don’t know any of them! Luckily for us, Take That have been so successful that their songs do a lot of our work. Everyone knows them and everyone loves them! You also get the accolade that the real band get. After many gigs we get people asking us for autographs and pictures and comments such as “you’re just like them” and “will you marry me?” etc. So I guess in some ways its very similar to being in the real band. On a slightly smaller scale maybe.

Are there many rival TT tribute acts on the circuit? How do they compare?

Yes! So many! Back in 2007 we were one of the very first to be doing it and there was about 2 or 3 other Take That tribute bands around. Now there must be hundreds of them. My opinion on how they compare? I guess I’m biased and I do think we’re certainly the best out there. I guess I wouldn’t be in this band if I didn’t! I believe in my boys 100%. I know as a group we have a similar look, a similar height and we also have the sounds and the mannerisms pretty damn close. I think our show is amazing. We work really hard on the shows to make sure they aren’t anything but amazing. So yes I do think we’re better than (one of our nearest rivals). However, I won’t name them but there’s about two or three other Take That tributes out there that I do think are amazing. They’re brilliant! They put the same effort into being like Take That as we do and I have a lot of respect for them and what they do. It also turns out the guys in those bands are really nice and down to earth when you speak to them and don’t appear to have any feelings of rivalry which is great and we feel the same! 

However, some Take That tribute bands are awful. Really really bad. And it appears to be those ones that usually try compete with us and try to put us down etc. They post comments on their official website and Facebook pages saying how bad we are! I don’t get involved with any of this. I don’t need to! I know how good we are – the dates in the diary and the response from the crowd is enough for me. The word “Brilliant” from Gary Barlow is enough for me! I don’t need to slag off other bands or shout from the rooftops how amazing we are in a bid to prove it to myself! Others do and I can only suggest it’s because deep down they know they’re not really that good.  

Can tribute gigs surpass concerts played by the original artists due to factors such as more intimate venues etc?

I think so, definitely! To see the real Take That is first of all far more expensive, you have to queue up all day to get near the front and if you don’t queue you’re almost certainly going to spend the concert watching a TV screen. At many of our gigs the venues are more intimate and the prices are somewhat cheaper.

There are many tribute acts that make no attempt to emulate the original act other than turning up and playing the songs. Do you think that this detracts from the experience?

I believe it’s totally the wrong approach. When I first joined the band I simply asked myself a very simple question. If I was going to see a tribute act of my all time favourite artist what would I want to see? My answer was equally simple: I’d want them to be as close to the real thing as possible! I’d want them to look like them, talk like them, move like them and communicate with the audience like them. That is what I always tried to do! At the time when I got the job I barely knew who Mark Owen was. But I made it my duty to find out exactly who he is and be as close to him as possible. I did this so the biggest fans of Mark can turn up to our gigs and feel satisfied we’re doing the real band justice, so they can experience the same thing they experience at a real Take That concert. I don’t want it to feel like a cheap imitation! I want it to be as good as Take That. Some people in other tribute acts think they’re too cool to pretend to be someone else.  I think they’re completely missing the point. People simply aren’t there to see you, they’re there to see who you’re a tribute to. It might be hard for some of their big egos to come to terms with, but unfortunately it’s true!

Do you think people underestimate the work that goes into tribute acts, especially when it comes to generating an electric atmosphere?

That’s the beauty of it! You see (mainly) men looking very miserable that have clearly been dragged along to our show by their other halves and are only there to get in the good books of their partners! However, by the end of the show you can see they’re up dancing, singing along and thoroughly having an amazing time! That is what makes the job so fulfilling. To know that we exceeded people’s expectations and that everyone who came along had a brilliant time and enjoyed themselves! That’s what it’s all about!

Are some audiences tougher to win over than others considering the boots that you have to fill?

Yes! Certainly! When we’re in the theatres it’s always amazing, we’ve never had a bad show. Everyone in the audience has paid to be there because they love Take That. But, if you’re at a wedding or birthday party where perhaps out of 400 people the only person in the room who is a Take That fan is the birthday girl it’s really tough. That’s when the job can be hard work to begin with! But it doesn’t matter – we still have everyone dancing and enjoying the show in the end regardless – it just takes some more work!

Take That are due to resurface next year – will you be revamping your show to bring it up to date?

We will do! We always keep up to date with the current look, costumes, set list etc. Watch this space!

Thanks, Matt Hall!

There's a list of forthcoming 'Rule The World' performances at the bottom of this page. If you can, GO AND SEE THEM. 

You'll find them on Facebook and Twitter too. Matt's on Twitter here. 

And if you like the sound of that, why not listen to this? 

LICHFIELD INTERROGATES: David Stubbs

Yeah, yeah, I know I was supposed to be shutting this down and moving onto bigger things, such as a fully-realised website and all, but it turns out that wasn't meant to happen, so we're stuck with this. 

Nonetheless, I do have a couple of completed interviews up my sleeve, and I am proud and honoured to announce the participation of a journalistic legend and one of the most intelligent men that I have ever encountered. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm humbled to be able to introduce to you the architect of some of the most enthralling writing of the last thirty years. A pin-sharp satirist, a master of his craft, a leading cultural observationist, a man who can make you both weep and enter an incurable state of mirth within the same intoxicating paragraph, and a figure whose writing was a colossal influence upon the teenage me in the bad old nineties...it's only that bloody journalist and legendary music writer David Stubbs - a gentleman in possession of a virtually unsurpassable amount of academic brilliance. I caught up with him a bit ago to talk music, movies, books, football and the bittersweet, arguably suffocating digital age that is accelerating at an increasingly incomprehensible speed.  

Do you think the printed music press has a future?

I think this is the future right now, and I'm gratified that there is still a music press in it! The arrival of the internet was disastrous for the music press on two fronts. Both music and music writing were now available for free. Even prior to the Net, papers like NME and Melody Maker were beginning to suffer because they were no longer the only places you could read about rock music. In the 1970s, even bands like Pink Floyd went entirely unacknowledged by the national press. By the 1990s, however, if you wanted to read about Pulp you could do so everywhere from GQ to the Sunday Telegraph magazine.

Clearly, the printed music press has declined in terms of both sales and clout and its content is over-determined by fretful marketing departments. Magazine covers are increasingly embarrassing on the eye, as if trying to appeal to ten year olds with attention deficit disorder. I saw one strapline recently which read, “Amazing Neil Young interview inside!” 'Amazing'? Please. This was symptomatic of a magazine culture that has lost its cool.

And yet, there remains a need for central agencies like the music papers. I remember back in the 1990s, when the internet was just arriving and there were very sanguine voices on the fringes of the alternative media suggesting that the information superhighway would be a great boon for musicians as they could now deliver their music  directly to fans, bypassing both record companies and the music press. Thing is, without both record companies (in terms of packaging, etc) and the press offering a conceptual framework for new music, it's simply an indefinite blare, a stream of bleeps, riffs and pulses, content without context.

Could you live without new music? What do you look for in new music in 2013?

I've often wondered whether there should be a moratorium on the production of all new music, for a year, maybe five years. Despite the increasingly bleak prospects for making a living, more and more people are having a go at it, encouraged I suppose by the relative ease and wherewithal in terms of production technology these days. What's dismaying isn't that 99% of it is dross but that there is actually so much genuinely decent music worth attending to, far, far more than the market could bear even in the best of all possible worlds. But then, I contradict myself because in fact I'm constantly on the listen-out for new music, a track or piece that'll scratch my itch that I'll obsess over on my headphones for a fortnight, which could be anything from Scuba to a lost Nurse With Wound hour-long set. Indeed, when I do discover something by accident I wonder at the sheer non-inevitable chance that introduced me to it, and go into mourning for all the great bits of music, things that I would love that I'm destined never to hear, despite my extensive foraging and radar.

What advice would you give to a new music journalist starting out?

Don't. Not these days. The last thing old geezers like me need is whippersnappers coming and competing for work. So, don't. And if you take that advice, you certainly should never have embarked on this career. It should be something you frankly can't help, a fatal calling. That's the feeling I get from a Bangs or a Morley or a Reynolds. This was the only thing they could possibly do. Asking them not to be music writers would be almost like asking a panda not to be a panda. I wonder if any teenager coming through would feel that sort of love for music journalism, given the limits on the way it's currently practised. It's harder – but I'm not one of those old fools who imagines that all the talent dried up with his own generation. There are great new voices out there, intimidatingly erudite.

Has the way that we consume music cheapened it?

Yes. Teenagers with any amount of technical nous now can either download or rip music from YouTube onto mp3. There was undoubtedly a value in the scarcity of new music in the 70s; the saving up from paper round or dinner money to buy new albums and 12-inches, the huddling over a transistor radio with a tape recorder mic during the John Peel Show. I wanted to hear groups like This Heat and Pere Ubu two years before I did but simply couldn't afford to – they were at the bottom of a long shopping list. No one else had these albums, there was obviously no MTV, they weren't at the record library. Eventually when I did hear them, that wait, that deprivation added immensely to the aura of their already-great albums. That's something I missed when I later got sent everything for free.

To what extent is/was Mr Agreeable a more extreme version of David Stubbs? What do you think it is about him that makes him so enduringly popular after all these years?

Thank you! Mr Agreeable was originally Mr Abusing, who himself was a punning twist on a preceding character called Mr Amusing, a desperately unfunny, cluelessly out of touch columnist character trying to take sidelong glances at the late 80s rock world and failing abysmally. One week I changed the “M” to a “B” and a new character was born, one who expressed himself in jeering sarcasm and direct, minimalist invective. Very bracing. I'm nothing like Mr Agreeable – I'm wet, polite, equivocal, non-confrontational, although occasionally, having created him, I find myself occasionally mutating into him in my ranty old age.

One thing I found helpful about Mr Agreeable as a character to channel some of my thoughts was that as a writer, I'd started to have second thoughts about the joy of slagging off artists. Martin Amis has written about this – as you get a bit older, what seems to be terrific sport when you're first starting out comes to feel like taking cheap shots. On a more mature, civil human level, you feel and understand the hurt of the artists when they take a critical beating after all they've invested in their work. I always felt if you said those things via a character like Mr Agreeable, it wouldn't hurt at much, it would lend a sort of ironic remove to that negative energy.

However, his popularity, as well as being to do with the universal and undying love of foul language, is perhaps also a response to the loss of acerbic edge in the music press, especially towards the bigger artists, who are protected by editors from the critical kickings they often deserve because the magazines they work for are jockeying to land interviews with them. That's why all those abysmal late Oasis albums got five star reviews across the board – reviewers were effectively under instructions to praise them to the skies, so as not alienate Noel and Liam and the record label.

Mr Agreeable's most recent outing was an infliction of critical GBH on Mumford & Sons in The Quietus. I think it was the most read/most liked review they ran in 2012. That could be because his scorn was considered a rare and refreshing thing in this day and age, or a measure of the sheer, untapped, uncatered for loathing for Mumford & Sons out there.

Did your move away from music journalism into other writing channels mean that you had become disheartened with covering music?

I've been focussing on writing my book on Krautrock for Faber & Faber, out next year (2014). When that's done, I'll probably pick back up on the music journalism – but I've always enjoyed writing in other fields – film, TV, sport, comedy.

Please describe the best/worst aspects of being firmly at the helm of the 1990s cultural scene. Is the 1990s a time you look back upon fondly, with disdain or a mixture of the two?

I have to admit, I felt things were slipping away from me personally in the 1990s. I enjoyed the music of the very early part of the decade – MBV, Radiohead, some of the superior shoegazing stuff, Orbital, The Orb, etc. However, I didn't really go to raves – I was married, settled and never a druggie and didn't feel sufficiently independent or mobile to join in with all of that. As someone who had always enjoyed city-based clubs, I suddenly felt a cultural/generation gap. Then came Britpop and the ladmag euphoria of the mid-90s which alienated me entirely. The 90s were the anti-angst decade, the anti-Joy Division decade. The feeling of Caucasian, nostalgic consensus that settled round Oasis, a subconscious, collective need to recreate The Beatles in an era of musical fragmentation; I wasn't mad for it. I receded into a more satirical role, creating various things on the Talk Talk Talk pages which were my domain – not just Mr Agreeable but characters like Pepe Le Punk, Derek Kent, Diary Of A Manics Fan. I was probably more disengaged then, as staff writer at MM from what was going on in the 90s than I am nowadays!

However, I've a book in the works about the 1990s entitled Untroubled Times. It was a rare decade, free of a geopolitical angst post-Berlin Wall (that would resume post-9/11) and an era in which there was at least the illusion of blue sky prosperity and perma-Labour government. I'm interested in how that fed into popular culture generally, not just the top, mad, sorted world of 90s music. 

Is it true that Melody Maker enforced a ‘no negative coverage of Oasis’ rule? Why do you think that came about if so?

Not while I was there. I was allowed to give (What's The Story) Morning Glory the semi-kicking it deserved. After I left in 1998 I've heard it was a different story, for the reasons I've outlined above.

Do you think that avant-garde art, music or cinema still has the potential to win over a mainstream audience? Can you think of any 21st century examples of this?

Avant garde art, yes – this is something I cover in my book Fear Of Music: Why People Get rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen. It concerns the contrasting fates of 20^th century visual, non -figurative art (hugely popular, hugely lucrative, as evidenced by The Tate Modern) and its musical equivalent, even though both derived from the same root. Avant garde music has a foothold, just about but it's a victim of its own sheer proliferation to some degree. Plus, the sheer, clinging conservatism of the vast majority of people, when it comes to music, be it dance, rock or classical never ceases to dismay me. All the same, there are tiny signs of progress, little successes and continued activity. Music is also beginning to find its way into the art galleries, which is encouraging.

As for avant garde cinema, it occurs to me that cinema might have been a great deal more avant garde had it not been for the talkies – prior to that, it felt like it had the potential to develop in tandem with all the great, radical movements of the early 20^th century. I've enjoyed the recent revival in artists ranging from Gary Lucas to Faust, Pere Ubu to ADF in soundtracking cinema. Good example I like recently was a new soundtrack to the Soviet film Mother (dir: Vseveolod Pudovkin) by Aggie Peterson, Per Martinsen and Sergey Suokas. Recommended!

What do you think about the current state of football? Does it still have a fragment of its heart intact?

Football has become depressingly unequal at club level. The big clubs remind me of corporations who like to think of themselves as prize specimens of successful capitalism, thriving in the ruthless world of free competition – but who, in fact, hate competition, want to tilt the playing field permanently in their favour, hack away the rope ladders that might allow for usurpers. From that point of view, yes, it is a little depressing – the game has become over-monied, predictable, torn away from community bases. Could a Derby County ever win the League again, or a Nottingham Forest or Aston Villa win the European Cup? Could a Wigan win the FA Cup (ah – and there you go – there's the fragment of its heart, still there). It can never be an absolute lockdown and retains its potential to thrill and upset, even now. I'll always be a fan. It remains a common, continuing thread in my life from childhood, preceding music or anything else – from the 1970-71 season onwards. I feel that those who aren't fans of football, or some other sport, are genuinely missing out on a whole dimension of life's spectacle – the cathartic, masochistic, joyful experience of getting involved in and keyed up about something that really doesn't matter at all, yet churns you up and makes you scream and shout the way the truly important things in life fail to.

Traditionally, great art, music, literature and cinema has been produced during times of political and social misery. Is today’s climate the exception to this rule, or do we simply have to dig deeper to find examples of it?

Yes, the Orson Welles “cuckoo clock” theory. I'd always believed that. In music, over the last 30-40 years, I've seen crested and troughs coincide almost exactly with periods of UK boom and recession, especially in the late 80s/early 90s. However, I think the prolonged period of economic fairweather from the mid-90s through to the late noughties broke that cycle. Rock music is no longer providing the soundtrack to Occupy/student demos, etc that we've seen over the last few years. It's not like 1968. That natural relationship no longer exists. Maybe things have to get a little worse before that starts to happen, or maybe music has lost its central role in the counterculture. There is great music, for sure, and yes, you have you dig deep but I don't feel as if its presence/absence is determined by our current state of economic woe. Not yet, anyway . . .

Is the internet changing humanity for the better or the worse? Is the technology advancing so fast that we are becoming unable to identify how to use it in humane ways?

For better and for worse. I often wish it had never been invented and yet I live on it. It's made my life easier and harder. It's brought me closer to things and detached me from them, ditto people. The world minus the internet, 1994, didn't look and feel so different in terms of cultural/stylistic content from our own and yet, of course, was so massively different. In the 50s/60s, you felt that the revolutions were in the nature of stuff – over the last 20 years, it's been a revolution in the way stuff is conveyed. I think we need to use it as hard and and as well as we can and also get out more, look at trees, tread pavements, step away from the screens, meet real people then stay in touch with them  on Facebook.

David's 1995 review of the second Oasis album. But stay here for now!

You’re the author of books like ‘Eminem: The Story Behind Every Song’. I’m part of generation that has grown up with hip-hop, so have never been in a position where it hasn’t been around. Did its emergence feel bit as revelatory as those around at the time said it to be? Plus, we’ve heard a lot about the music press resisting the genre, and even Peel fans reacting badly when he championed it. Did you experience first-hand bigotry against it in your line of work during the mid-to-late 1980s?

I'm a huge fan of old school hip-hop, loved the way that, as Bowie put it, hip-hop reconfigured the popular song. Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul, early NWA, loved it. For me, something happened to hip-hop when it went gangsta, global. At its worst, most popular, it was no longer about fighting the power, or rap skills, but living a sort of bling video fantasy, in which white people were as absent as black people were from 50s/60s pop fantasies of America. In this instance, the absence of white people seemed to be a way of avoiding the humiliating fact of continued white hegemony. It was now more about trite, individualist self-aggrandisement, in which the only victims were other “niggas” – all very black on black, as documented in Ronin Ro's Have Gun, Will Travel.

As for Eminem, I thought he was interesting in the way Hendrix was to rock. As a white kid, he was able to say stuff, adopt stances no African-American hip-hopper would be able to. Same as Hendrix, being one of the relatively few black rockers, was able to contribute something no Clapton, Townshend or Page ever could. Both enriched the respective cultures they invaded as racial outsiders.

Re your point about bigotry, however; the answer's no, maybe because at MM I worked alongside some pretty rarified characters like Simon Reynolds and Frank Owen, who was very early indeed in terms of securing hip-hop interviews. I was right at the edge, by association, as early as '86, '87.

Resurgence of far-right groups, mass unemployment, a press that gets away with everything, payday loans, Ed Sheeran: Is there a way out? Do you have faith in the masses to change things? Or have they been completely neutered?

As a critic/cultural commentator, one thing I've learned is that when change of any kind does occur, it's not as a result of some prescription or suggestion you've thrown out in your writing. These things happen, quite often when you've persuaded yourself that things have become so paralysed and postmodern there's no possibility of anything new under the sun happening. Even when they do happen, there's often a temptation, to which I have certainly succumbed more than once, to pretend that these things aren't really happening, you've seen it all before, it's a flash in the pan, make sense of it according to your tried and trusted critical framework of historical precedents. You see this a lot in the way NME 's older hacks covered punk. They constantly professed a yawning, jaded sense of deja vu and anti-climax but had no idea of what a transformative force it actually was, how it would cleave UK rock history in two. New things have happened, will happen, which I had no idea were coming and will probably under-acknowledge even as they happen under my nose. Helps to be humble and realise this. (My old friend Simon Reynolds, by the way, has always been excellent at bucking this tendency – very early indeed on new movements in club/underground music in particular).

Why do bands go shit?

They don't always but when they do . . . incuriosity, spending too much time in the hermetic confines of the studio and their own work, not lifting their heads up and maintaining a meerkat awareness of what's happening around them. It sometimes depressed me with bands on the road, say in Europe that they spent so much time sound-checking, failing to coordinate and meet up in the hotel lobby that they didn't get it together to spend at least an hour or so in the cities they were travelling through. Sometimes seemed to me that bands were a bit like lighthouse keepers – for all their ostensible roles as Great Illuminators, the very nature of their job kept them somewhat stranded and cut off from the world. Getting bands to talk about things other than How It Went In The Studio could be hard work. My tactic was always to spend the first 20 minutes on How It Went In The Studio just to get them warmed up, then ask the actual questions once we'd dispensed with the stuff which was of immense interest to them but of no interest to the average reader whatsoever.

Thanks, David Stubbs!

Modern Music: Not Beige After All