Losing My Edge

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to get a 40-year-old man who doesn’t know anything about fashion to write a column for you. The idea is to make me cavort in an ungainly manner like a man half my age for pocket change like an internet form of bear baiting. They knew that, because I’d just had a baby boy and my industry is in a terminal state of decline, I would be unlikely to say no. Despite all this, I’m glad VICE are giving me the opportunity to get some things off my chest.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, ‘menk’ is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal.”

Menk One: Losing My Edge

Where do all these 22-year olds come from?

“Memorable? I’ve been stabbed during three interviews. One of the times wasn’t that bad, just in the palm of the hand with a pair of scissors, the second time I was asking for it and the third time wasn’t by the band. I’d been drinking Iron Maiden’s rider all day then went to interview Trivium at the K West. Hotel security threw me out because of how drunk I was. I got into a tussle with some muggers in an alleyway a few minutes later. To be fair to them, it was me who grabbed the knife, I was really pissed.”

Every two or three weeks a college that teaches journalism somewhere in the country sends a new, trainee music writer up to my offices to interview me. (Apparently they’re unaware that this is a collapsing industry which only throws up a handful of new positions on a good year.) These fresh-faced poppets arrive at my door as regular as clockwork before, two years later – and again, as regular as clockwork – they start writing for Q. Where are all these colleges teaching outmoded courses? Do they offer courses in how to become a plague doctor, a mummer or a steeplejack? Today’s hopeful student asks me another question. I reply:

“My favourite song of the last ten years is ‘Losing My Edge’ by LCD Soundsystem.”

This girl will be sacking me in less than five years time. She will look unbelievably great as she talks about “fresh ears” and the “writer/reader community” and all the way through the humiliating process she will be thinking: “Get your sweating carcass out of my office, you Saxondale clown.” But for now, another question to answer:

“I’ve been afraid before loads of interviews. If it’s someone you grew up loving, you never quite lose that towering sense of otherness. Like, I was so terrified before I interviewed Mark E Smith I spilled a cup of coffee down myself because my hands were shaking so much but then the amount we drank probably calmed me down a lot. The nerves just got worse and worse when I was interviewing Grace Jones because she kept on hitting on me. There was a bit when… Yeah, I read Miranda Sawyer’s interview with her… Yeah, it was brilliant wasn’t it? Yeah… she’s a great writer… No, I don’t know how you’d get to speak to her.”

What does she hope to learn from me? When I was her age I worked in an aerosol factory and slept on other peoples’ couches. I’d been thrown out of university and subsisted on cheese sandwiches and sherry. I didn’t lift a pen in anger about music until I was 33 – this was a field of endeavour that I drifted into by accident. I was the age that most music writers with any sense had already found something more constructive to do. But the truth of the matter is, I don’t really care that much about anything else.

“Was my age a benefit? Well, I already had crack cocaine out of my system. Ha ha ha. If only I could have said the same about my genetic disposition towards thirstiness. Ha ha ha. What? Thirstiness. Ha ha ha. Huh? It means I’m an alcoholic… Don’t be, it’s not your fault.”

What do I look like to her? Middle-aged man with long hair in a heavy metal T-shirt. The beard of someone who sleeps behind a hedge on an A-road roundabout. Face permanently blotched red down one side with thousands of burst capillaries after spending three days awake doing amphetamines in 1996. A Monday night which culminated in nurses shouting: “Shave his chest, shave his chest!” A nose broken 17 times and eventually surgically rebuilt. Forehead like the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Right eyelid drooping down over a partially sighted eye, scarred and damaged beyond repair.

“Music journalism doesn’t mean what it used to simply because music doesn’t mean what it used to. There are a lot of reasons for this but it’s mainly the excess of leisure options we have these days. When I was 17… sorry I was about to go all “Four Yorkshiremen” for a second then. But if you’re really into music then there are enough interested people out there that it’s worth doing, and it has plenty of intrinsic reward. Most of the people who read you will hate you and think you’re an appalling fraud but that’s something else entirely. It’s mainly sadomasochists not egomaniacs who do this job these days.”

Please don’t ask me about Tumblr, Last FM or We7.com… I don’t know what they are.

“Well, people can hear music at the click of a button now, which is interesting because they don’t need you to describe music, genre tag it or even tell you whether it’s any good or not. You just have to hope that there are enough people out there who want to engage in a debate about music with you or are interested in what you have to say.”

Later in the day, after she leaves, I check the battered booklet in my bag. There’s a meeting round the corner from our temporary offices in Tottenham. I don’t usually go but given what day it is I feel I should for some reason. I’ve still never actually talked at one of these things other than to say: “Hello, my name is John and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for three years.”

I drink a can of Coca-Cola. Man, I love this stuff so much, it occasionally makes me want to cry. I lock up and leave. What a shit way to spend my 40th birthday.

JOHN DORAN