I’m not with the band – Sylvia Patterson’s view of the music industry

Many fans of the music industry have harboured dreams of being up close and personal with our favourite stars.  In the case of Sylvia Patterson, she really has met numerous music glitterati and had her own slightly cynical but nevertheless humourous laughs and jokes with them.  Like the time she asked Madonna if she had eaten the placenta after giving birth, and broached the subject of “ill timed” erections with Prince?

Eminen apparently threated her with a hammer and when she met Amy Winehouse she reminded her of the importance of a “very good tea”. She went to a “stupidly opulent” Bros party and still had to camp out in less than good London accommodation after rubbing shoulders with the absolute best of the pop industry favourites.

Patterson found her job in an ad for a staff writer for Smash Hits in the 1980s.  She left behind an apparently alcoholated mother and a boring job on a Dundee mag before finding her fortune on a publication run by Smiths-loving indie kids who worshipped pop music and there was much office politics within the organ.

Patterson carved her way happily here using apparently “inverted commas within inverted commas”. She interviewed Jimmy Page and Robert Plant later for NME and obliged them by saying they had no sense of humour and talked incessantly of one thing – pop music.

Patterson asked Beyoncé why on earth would she do a Pepsi commercial  and the singer replied “it’s an honour”.   She wrote about Westlife describing them as “the Dolly sheep of the boy bands”.  Going to another event where David Beckham showed up she recalls his favourite childhood smell was “soap on a rope” – this to launch a fragrance range.

She decided to resign from NME and recalls her sadness an anger at the decline of the music press. She well remembers the days when a paper copy of a pop magazine was everybody’s weekend dream.  Melody Maker, Select and Smash Hits all hit the buffers and declined.

One of her jokey comments was to say that Beyoncé should never marry anyone called Mr Castle….her book “I’m not with the band” is fun reading and ultimately upbeat.  Enjoy.

Penny Nair Price.