Physical and Psychic Encounters With The Extremely Famous And How They Have Forever Altered Me As A Person
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Joni
I am always listening to the great early Joni Mitchell records and seeing photos of the house where Joni Mitchell lived in Laurel Canyon in the 60s and thinking, “Man, would I love to have been there, then.” But I am not sure that in reality I would have liked to have been Joni Mitchell’s housemate in the 60s. “Joni, can we just do this thing we have planned to do today, just this one time, without you carefully and piercingly crafting a brilliant song about it?” you’d find yourself asking, after a while. Soon the party invitations would begin to dry up. “The honest-to-god truth of it is, nobody wants to host or go to anything any more,” friends would tell you on the phone as you stood in the kitchen you shared with Joni, snapping pens with your free hand. “It’s nothing personal. She’s just too good at dissecting everything. It’s made people stiff and self-conscious. They’re afraid to talk or have a hairstyle. Some of us will now waste as much as four hours just thinking about what a scarf says about our motives.” Later, Joni would ask you if you’d seen her guitar anywhere. “Sorry, no, haven’t got a clue,” you’d reply, wondering if you’d added enough underbrush and soil.
Paul
My favourite Beatle is George Harrison but the most obnoxiously talented and hard-working Beatle has always been Paul McCartney and I will hear no argument to the contrary. The closest I ever came to touching part of Paul McCartney was about eight feet, in early October 1999, at the launch of his almost worthwhile ‘Run Devil Run’ album in Leicester Square in the then still just about beating heart of London. I was 24 and working for the Guardian newspaper as their Music Critic: a job I’d initially turned down because I quite liked my life in Nottingham reading books in fields and buying records and travelling to gigs, but then, influenced by peers and a general philosophy of “Why not”, accepted the position after all, at a salary that - being skilled at neither “playing the media game” nor basic maths - I’d not realised was either a) an insulting starting point that I was expected to haggle my employers up from, b) a special salary specifically tailored for naive young fuckwits from Nottinghamshire or c) both. Backstage at the album launch I saw Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr and a bloke I thought might have been Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick or Tich from Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and a table piled high with lavish press packs of the album. Feeling the weight of my belated revelation about my monthly pay cheque and noticing that Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr and the bloke who might have been Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick or Tich from Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich showed no interest in the press packs, I bagged about half a dozen to sell to a guy called Steve who came down from Cardiff in a van every month and bought CDs off me and some other music writers. But this was all after I’d spent many minutes in a long queue for the venue, not realising that it was a queue for members of the Paul McCartney Fanclub and that I, as a member of the press, was supposed to walk straight down the red carpet and into the venue. For years I’ve characterised this in my mind as the understandable mistake of a young overawed provincial who’d just moved to London, but, checking the facts and seeing that I’d been living in the capital and doing my new job for almost four months by then, I have to face the fact that it was probably just down, like a lot of my other mistakes of the time, to being a total airhead.
Mr Birkinshaw
One day when I was eight or nine the Sheriff Of Nottingham, whose name that year was Mr Birkinshaw, came to our school in Nottingham, which we initially thought was amazing, since we all knew about the Sheriff’s many run-ins with the local celebrity outlaw Robin Hood. “What is Robin Hood like?” we asked. “Well, it’s interesting you should ask that, because he’s actually a very nice man,” replied The Sheriff. “I went to his house in the forest for dinner just yesterday.” But The Sheriff’s timing was unfortunate, his visit being during 1984, at the height of a breakdancing craze that had been sweeping the school’s upper assembly hall for literally days. Having extracted the one bit of information we wanted from Mr Birkinshaw, we swiftly returned to our knee spins, windmills and butterflies. “Now keep still, everyone,” either Miss Needham or Mr Peck - I can’t remember which - said. “The Sheriff has been very kind to take time out of his busy job to visit us here today.” But it was no use. History and its infamous tussles had limited appeal, especially when you discovered they were more amicable than you’d imagined in your energetic and violent young minds. We were out on the floor, deep into the zone, in the now, focussing on what was truly important in life.
Martin
I was having breakfast in the pub where I’d stayed the previous night and I looked two tables to my left and saw the important veteran folk singer Martin Carthy. I texted my friend who I knew liked Martin Carthy’s music and told her Martin Carthy was eating some sausages near me. “You absolutely HAVE to speak to him,” she texted back. But then I thought about it and decided that wasn’t strictly true, there was no law saying I had to speak to Martin Carthy just because Martin Carthy was in the same pub as me, and I let Martin Carthy eat his sausages in peace, which I feel confident in saying, without being presumptuous, is probably the way Martin Carthy would have wanted me to handle the situation.
Brian and Scarlett
I was in a lift and glanced to my left and realised that the man standing next to me in the lift was Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. I decided not to say anything to him because all I could think to say was “You’re Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys” or “I prefer the less renowned albums by your band where you’re essentially more of a background figure” and he would have have been already aware of one of these things and potentially offended by the other. Fortunately the lift was quite modern and didn’t take long to reach our floor of departure. Unexpectedly Scarlett Johansson was there, looking just like Scarlett Johansson but even better, and one of the people I was talking to reckoned she kept looking at me but there was a dramatically more handsome man standing directly behind me at the time, which is a detail I suppose I could omit in the telling of the anecdote but which many would argue is a significant one.
Roger
In 1998 I chatted for a while to Roger McGuinn from the Byrds, who came across just like the honey-voiced human teddy bear I had anticipated. The detail I remember most vividly is that at the time Roger was wearing a thick sweater that looked home-knit and very warm, which is strange considering it was summer and he was at home in California at the time and our conversation took place over the phone.
Geoff
Until I was 18, the most famous person I had met - apart from maybe The Sheriff of Nottingham and Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough’s son Nigel - was Geoff Capes, the winner of the 1983 and 1985 World’s Strongest Man tournaments. “Eyup Tom,” Geoff said to me, in a deep Lincolnshire voice. But maybe he didn’t and I just saw him once in the distance on the hillside below Nottingham Castle, pulling a face and lifting a Peugeot into the air. Whatever the case, I feel like I had the sort of childhood where I might have met Geoff Capes, and maybe that’s what can be most centrally learned from all this.
Lou
One time I was supposed to go to Ireland and interview Lou Reed. I was a tiny bit excited about it - mostly because I’d never been to Ireland, but also because I love the Velvet Underground, the band Lou Reed had once been in. Then someone told me Lou hated all journalists - which I had to admit seemed a fair profession to hate, if you were going to choose one profession to hate all of - and had made the last journalist who interviewed him burst into tears, and - in a request that seemed less fair - the public relations firm Lou had hired told me I had to call a man in Lou’s closest circle of acquaintances who would carefully brief me on all the things I should and shouldn’t talk to Lou about. After I’d called Lou’s close acquaintance, I listened to some of Lou’s solo records and remembered that I didn’t like them even half as much as I liked the Velvet Underground, and I thought: “You could go to Ireland and interview Lou Reed but in the end nobody is forcing you to at knifepoint, plus it’s quite likely that Ireland will still be there, later. You could just go and do the pub quiz at Stoke Bardolph, just off the Nottingham to Lowdham Road, with some friends instead.” So I went and did the pub quiz at Stoke Bardolph, just off the Nottingham to Lowdham Road, with some friends instead, and we came third overall, which wasn’t bad, as it was an extremely popular quiz with a quizmaster who did not take his job lightly.
Clive
Everyone I know has been in a room with a celebrity at some point. It’s no big deal, and it happens. I’ll tell you what is rare nowadays: being in a room with a builder. It always feels so exclusive when it takes place and when it does I can’t help feeling briefly like a very special and noteworthy person. We had a builder here yesterday, after months of whispers and rumours about him potentially being here then him not being here after all. At one point the builder’s sleeve even brushed against mine. “Can you believe he was really here, for almost an entire morning, in our actual bungalow?” we asked each other, again and again, in the hours that followed. It is doubtful it will ever happen again but the important thing is that nobody will ever be able to take those memories away from us. “This is the mug that the builder drank from,” we will say in years to come, sighing, as we boil the kettle in our otherwise ordinary kitchen.
Because I’m fairly old, I have written quite a lot of books now. These are what I generally recommend to people when people are considering the idea of reading one:
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P.S. There’s an audio version of this piece below, read by me, for paying subscribers: