![]() ![]() With devilish élan, a hopeless editor of the NME is described as “an editorial marketing whizz – a genius at marketing in particular”. Passionate about his craft, Kessler stomps through a minefield of managerial interference and mediocre colleagues with a stridency that is guaranteed to earn him a few enemies. To my eye, though, the book is at its most compelling when it trains its gaze on the magazine game. In a chapter dedicated to the Happy Mondays, he writes, “there you are, Sean Ryder, spliff in hand, hunched over the mic wearing a chunky-knit cardigan and brown cords, barking out rhythmic slang poetry, eyes closed, smile wide, love and violence floating in the air.” Heralding the arrival of the Strokes, he writes how the editorial staff in the NME office “could hear the plug being pulled on all the scummy, stagnant American rock music we’d been forced to… bathe in in recent years”. Justly recognised as a fine and expressive music writer, Kessler deftly executes the difficult task of bringing artists to life in a way that others have failed to do: Radiohead, Oasis, the Fall, Aphex Twin, Manic Street Preachers and many more are recalled in bold and vivid strokes. But despite a career in the VIP section of a media establishment that in those days had the power to make or break, his memoir is the work of an innately independent operator. Later, as editor of Q, he presided over the most sought-after front cover in music publishing. ![]() As a writer on the NME, a title bought by more than 100,000 readers each week, Kessler’s stories could dramatically alter a band’s fortunes. An unquenchable urge to cause as much trouble as is humanly possible will, when required, also come in handy. Before all else, the best music journalists are motivated by a desire to make the distance between private thoughts and public record as slim as it can be. To my mind, this ostensibly meagre incident validates both the author and his engaging book. I asked Jeff Buckley what he’d taken from his father.” “I said I wouldn’t, but then I did,” he writes in his memoir, Paper Cuts. The 26-year-old Kessler gave his consent to a press officer’s demand that no questions be asked about the artist’s father, the folk singer Tim Buckley, who died of a heroin overdose when his son was just eight years old. In the summer of 1994, Columbia Records paid for Ted Kessler to fly from London to Atlanta to interview the now deceased singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley.
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