Alastair McKay's Blog

I wrote an extended version of my interview with Jane Birkin in which she talked about Serge Gainsbourg, motherhood, and the subversive legacy of Je T'Aime. https://open.substack.com/pub/alastai...

One of the great punk records is Marquee Moon by Television. There is nothing punk about Television, really, except that they appear at the right time, in the right place, and Richard Hell is briefly in the band, and he has some claim to be the inventor of the punk look, with the spiky hair and the safety pins. But there is only one TV in Television, and Hell is gone long before Marquee Moon

A few weeks ago, when the news was bad, I sent Gordon an email. I wanted to say something; anything. Gordon didn’t want cards and had limited use for sympathy, so I emailed an apology. I had a nagging memory about a historical injustice dating from 1988. It was about punk rock. It was about Gordon.Where were we? We were in a basement in Stockbridge, finding our voices. We were in the office

I used to see Paul Morley in the street. He lived nearby, and occasionally could be glimpsed outside Sainsbury’s glowering intensely in his long coat, black turtleneck and post-modern trousers. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to thank him for his music journalism in the NME, which was passionate and pretentious at a time when being passionate and pretentious was the best thing going. I wanted

In a white room above the alley where David Bowie posed for the cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bobby Gillespie and Jim Lambie are discussing hair. “Do you ever get those days,” the artist is saying to the rock’n’roll star, “when your hair is just mental?” “Aye,” the rock star replies. “When I wash it and go to sleep, then I wake up and the front bit goes.”

When I started Alternatives To Valium the idea was that the artists could supply their own material without the interference of a journalist. It quickly became apparent that - as much as they might complain about interviews - musicians weren’t great at interpreting themselves. One of those who tried was the late Colin Vearncombe of Black, who supplied this manifesto. I borrowed part of it for the

Interviews prompt a question about questions. Just as fiction writers are often said to be writing autobiography, interviewers ask questions about themselves. Or - and this is where it gets complicated - they are asking questions about their imagined reader. The most successful newspapers have a very clear idea of who their imagined reader is. A hardboiled former editor of The Scotsman with a

The first time I see George Melly, at an exhibition of new paintings by Lucian Freud, he is dressed casual: suede cowboy hat, dark jacket, sponge-soled trainers and a black eye-patch, the result of a detached retina. “This,” he declares of the exhibition, “is a collection of bits.” The second time I meet him, in the daytime gloom of Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, he is in full plumage: the hat

Covent Garden Hotel, London, on the publication of Hersh’s book Chain of Command, September 2004.Seymour Hersh is cradling a whisky from the honesty bar when his cell phone rings. “Yuh?” he says. “How am I doin’? I’m pippin’ away. How are you doin’ for chrissake? Can I help you? Do you know what I say when people ask me? ‘There’s two sides to every story and I know you have your side, but

 The early reviews of Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights have focused on the anger. There is a lot of it. There is anger about the Holocaust, about casual anti-Semitism, and the refusal of English Jews to make a fuss. But actually, anger doesn’t quite do justice to the complex of feelings conjured by Jacobson’s prose, because the fury is wrapped in black comedy. And while it is intensely specific