Rock’s Back Pages x 3: Guest on the podcast, McLaren bio extract about David Harrison’s tryout as Sex Pistols frontman and archival pieces by me on the Spice Girls (1996) and US alternative zines (1994)
//In conversation with (from top left) RBP’s Mark Pringle, Jasper Murison-Bowie and Barney Hoskyns//
I’m the featured guest on this week’s podcast from the world’s premier music journalism site rocksbackpages.com.
I go way back with RBP founder and author Barney Hoskyns; he commissioned pieces from me when he was Mojo editor in the early 90s and we launched my music press book In Their Own Write, RBP and photographer Jill Furmanovsky’s rockarchive.com on the same night at a Shoreditch gallery nearly 20 years ago.
I had fun talking to Barney and his confreres Mark Pringle and Jasper Murison-Bowie. The chat ranged from my background in trade journalism to, of course, the new Malcolm McLaren biography. Listen to the podcast here.
//David Harrison in customised Sex t-shirt, 1975//
RBP have also published an exclusive extract from the book about the British artist David Harrison’s experiences as a customer of McLaren’s boutiques at 430 King’s Road, as well as the brief spell in the summer of 1975 when he rehearsed with the musicians who became the Sex Pistols as a potential frontman before the recruitment of John Lydon in August that year. Read that here.
//Photo: Toby Amies//
And RBP has selected me for the spotlight Almost Famous slot, which features my 1994 piece about alternative US magazines from Ben Is Dead and Maximum Rock’n’Roll to Forced Exposure and Grand Royal and the 1996 interview I conducted with the then-unknown Spice Girls.
Copies of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren are available from amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones or support your local independent booksellers by checking whether they’re taking orders and organising deliveries.