Sylvia Patterson > Quotes

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“A small rumpus erupted over a review of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ by U2, the biggest-band-in-the-world and drearily po-faced windbags forever blubbing on a cactus. There were, I pointed out, ‘no streets in the desert’ and deemed Bono, somehow, ‘a goon’. Sackfuls of hate mail arrived from U2-devoted Smash Hits viewers while a headline in an Irish newspaper bellowed, ‘GOON BONO BLASTED BY TOP POP MAG.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“I was reviews editor, which I was hopeless at seeing as it required organisation, decisions, delegation and ability to decipher which singles, albums, films, videos, concerts, books and competitions were best suited to the viewers from an actual Alpine avalanche of Jiffy bags permanently engulfing the reviews desk. This was music industry boom time,”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“At the time, many female colleagues congratulated me for withstanding Barney’s withering attitude and outing what we’d now describe as a flagrant celebrity love cheat. Today, though, the ‘great’ New Order runaround fiasco of 1986 seems howlingly naive, a joyless and ill-judged one-note harrumph both on stars who refused to Play The Game and a desire to prove Barney Sumner a bounder – hardly for cheating on his wife (who I did not know existed) but for failing to turn up to a Smash Hits interview with an arsenal of hilarious jokes. We were always scuppered, anyway, with the realities of rock ’n’ roll: to protect the youngest viewers, the majority of references to wimmin, booze ’n’ drugs were merely skipped around in a riotous twinkle of euphemism, slang and innuendo, all ‘rock ’n’ roll mouthwash’, ‘foxtrels’ and ‘mazin’ rumpo … speryoooo!’ In”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“It’s true!’ he’d smile, coyly, and usually he was right, if unable to balance humanity’s cruelty, corruption and selfishness with even a scintilla of its compassion, intelligence or happiness, other than a melancholy nostalgia for the carefree joys of childhood. If his then comically wry nihilism would become, soon enough, the calcified cynicism which killed him, he was also softly spoken, peculiarly gentle, his lilting Welsh timbre the lightness through the foreboding darkness of most everything he had to say.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“I wonkily pitched a tent and in the name of ‘homely’ décor affixed to its interior an enormous poster of (who else?) Alien Sex Fiend. The greatest thrill that weekend was interviewing Half Man Half Biscuit – the folk-rock wits from the Wirral whose surreal-pop masterpiece Back In The DHSS had dominated the indie village in 1985 – in the back of their fag-fumed Transit van. The Smash Hits Glastonbury Team 1986 lasted one night out in the field before heading off mid-Saturday night for a delicious meal and a fluffy bed in a nearby swish hotel, photographs of which then became ‘a dream sequence’ printed in ver Hits, pretending we’d been (as if!) lying in the swamp for days.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“It was a rare incidence of a well-known public figure having a strident opinion about anything, the infinite freedom of our digital age having become, ironically, a simultaneous opportunity for infinite suffocation, the most colossal public arena mankind has ever invented now so often running on fear: of public humiliation, of ruinous tabloid headlines, of having the ‘wrong’ opinion, of ludicrously disproportionate scandal and the platoons of Twitter trolls on constant trawl for the sackable offence.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“This was, ultimately, the fault of Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalistic godhead who’d made malleable teenage romantics like me believe writing amid a narcotic seizure was not only possible but ultimate proof of a ‘proper’ rock ’n’ roll scribe (and his story, of course, turned out well, i.e. fired a bullet into his own head at the age of sixty-seven).”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“Last night in the twilight’s gloom, A butterfly flew in my room, Oh what beauty, oh what grace Who needs visitors from outer space?”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“You pick up the NME and there’s a pair of exposed breasts with Miami written in cocaine, that really sums up modern culture in Britain,’ observed Stuart. ‘I like breasts but let’s not be stupid here. I think that some really, really, really vulgar ideology crept in a few years ago, some really fucking nasty sexist ideas and anti-thought devices and they got largely ignored by anyone with any intelligence or integrity. But since then, they’ve been so omnipresent that a lot of young people and people who actually have a bit of say, don’t think anything of them. A pair of breasts on the cover of NME would’ve been seen as abhorrent eight years ago. Even one year ago, but eight years ago unthinkable. But breasts are now the selling point of almost every magazine in every shop.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“rather, one of the NME Boys did the ‘proper’ review and I had to do the annoying bit, the ‘vox pop’ section, i.e. talk to the punters, report from the frontline of The Vibes and then write it up immediately afterwards. While pished, or on drugs, at the time.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“Even Bros were oddly sexless, the Disney-faced twins Matt and Luke Goss surely bred to perfection in a Nazi eugenicist’s Petri dish, with their too-ironed shirts and immaculate hair, permanently fragrant in a mist of expensive cologne. The most troubling addiction within Bros was the confectionary compulsion of the non-hunk we dubbed ‘Ken’, a teenager from Kirkcaldy not-”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“Much like being in a fantastic new band, surely, having a favourite new band is one of life’s most intoxicating thrills, a prismatic explosion of hitherto dormant energy channelled from the atmosphere directly into your soul; an atomic collision promising unknowable new possibilities of sonic beguilement, lyrical connection, dancing upside down on a dance floor with your greatest friends and talking synapse-shredded cobblers ’til three days hence at dawn. All of these things, at least, were the touchstones of Oasis fandom. It’s not so very different from falling in love (even if it is in the worst possible, all-obsessional, one-directional way). One”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music

“Safely bunkered in Carnaby Street, I filled the news section, Bitz, with my little-known indie heroes, just as I’d gotten away with it at Etcetra, with fewer gothy madmen involved.”
― Sylvia Patterson, I'm Not with the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music