Shouting from the Hop

Julie Burchill

Julie is quite famous now too, as a writer of novels and a newspaper columnist. I first met her when she was 17, on her first NME assignment. I was with my mate and work colleague Frank, and we were going to see Patti Smith at Hammersmith Odeon in October 1976. We were on our way to have a drink in the Britannia pub (now long gone), opposite the Odeon, and Frank had told me that a couple of new writers were coming along that night and that he had to meet them. We walked into the pub and Frank saw Julie, standing alone by the door. We said hi and I asked her if she wanted a drink? She asked me for "a screwdriver"...At that time, I didn't have a clue what this consisted of, but guessed that the barman would know. I got our beers and asked for Julie's drink, but the bar guy didn't know what it was either. I had to go back and ask Julie what she wanted in her screwdriver...eventually, Tony Parsons showed up, we drank and chatted a while then went across the road to the Odeon.

Inside the Odeon, Julie and Tony were getting excited down the front, while I tended to watch things from a little further back usually. We had missed the support band - The Stranglers - but we spoke for a while, as they were jumping up and down on the seats (!) but a steward asked me to go outside as I had a beer in my hand.

After the gig, we all met up again outside, as Frank had three backstage passes (for Tony, Julie, and himself), courtesy of John Curd (the promoter). Frank, ever the mouthy one, said he'd try to get me in backstage too; round the back of the Odeon, the stage door area was chaotic, with about a hundred people all pushing to get near the door. We struggled up to the door, Frank banged on it, the usual "F*** Off" reply came and then Frank said he'd got passes. He had them in his hand when the door opened and the guy asked how many he'd got, Frank confidently said "four" and in we all walked! We had to hang around downstairs as it was very crowded back there too, but eventually Julie (and maybe Tony) got to see Patti in her dressing room for a brief chat. Patti and the band left after we'd been hanging around for about 30 minutes, and we did too. Frank went home to Shepherds Bush, and I shared a black cab back into town with Tony and Julie, dropping them off near Oxford Street; I carried on home in the same cab. I believe from what they have each written that that was their first night (of passion) together, and it's strange that I was part of that.

Robert Kennedy Parsons, their offspring, came along a couple of years later, and our two heroes left NME for bigger and better things, swanning off into the sunset with their babe.

Julie was quite arrogant during her time at NME, but she was a good writer. She has obviously gone on to much bigger and brighter things, making her fortune, losing it, and is now re-building her career again.

Her own view of working at NME is below:

"At the time, working for NME was all enormously impressive - as a 17-year-old virgin from the provinces I had a good excuse to be impressed by this rubbish. If Robert Plant bought journalists half a shandy they thought it was fantastic. But no one had any money.
The bands were living on a fiver a week and we weren't paid anything. It was hard enough trying to find the money to buy a bottle of cider. In the early Seventies, with dinosaur rock, everybody was living like hogs, but by the late Seventies Tony Parsons and I were taking lemonade bottles back to the shop to get the money for the fare to work the next day. It was an incredibly cheap lifestyle when you look back on it. If a PR had half a gramme of coke in the office it was like the second coming. What they wouldn't have done for a lick of dandruff. I have got one good story: Iggy Pop tried to get off with me in Manchester. We were in his hotel room. He was always bothering me and was obsessed with me. Tony (Parsons - Burchill's ex-husband and fellow NME scribe) promised him some speed pills but it was laxatives and he had to go on stage. He was not well-placed to do a live show."

Monty Smith

Minty Smoth was a good guy. He loves his films, and has for years, been the man who writes the movie blurb that you see in the Daily Mirror each day. He was also the man that brought the Silver Screen (film section) to life in NME each week. With film and music overlapping considerably at the time, this was a key appointment in the late 70's, and the position/gap has never been filled since Monty left in my opinion.

Monty loved movies, beer, Gillingham Football Club, and his wife and his (four at the last count) kids, in that order. He had a small cinema built into the basement of his house, and he regularly had people round to see films there! He would drink in the pubs around Carnaby Street (Cumberland Stores, Sun and 13 Cantons, Blue Posts, etc) during the day, and at his local pub every evening. You rarely saw him drunk though!
When at the printers, we used to wander up to the various pubs of Kettering (the Three Cocks Inn was the most famously named pub...) on the lunchtimes we were there, getting a couple of pints plus a meal in if we could.
He usually passed up the option of joining in our train card games, preferring to read and drink. Monty was another of the team involved in the Bedford incident, where we didn't get back to London from Kettering one night due to British Rail's failure to have enough electricity! Back at St Pancras we would normally have a quick beer in the bar too before heading home.

He had regular drinking partners too; Tom Sheehan, who was a photographer for Melody Maker was a regular companion, as was Danny Baker once he'd joined NME. In fact, most NME staff ended up down the boozer with Monty at some stage - Parsons, Murray, MacLaughlin, Gill, Tyler, all liked a beer or ten.

Monty went to see his local football team at each home game, and didn't seem to take much interest in his kids until they were about four or five years old ("when they have developed a brain..."); any younger, he'd leave things to the wife.

At home, he had a valuable original Wurlitzer juke box, and put all his favourite singles on it.

Monty didn't get many free records, as most other staff did; he got film preview tickets mostly. He always invited people along to see films (or gigs) if he had spare tickets - we went to a preview of Sharky's Machine (a great Burt Reynolds film) together in a Wardour Street film distributors small in-house cinema one night.

A genuine good guy, he seemed to be friends with everyone, and everyone counted him amongst their friends.

Roy Carr

Roy was strange bearded guy, with awful teeth, and his hair in a pony tail, who loved his jazz. He was therefore a funny bloke to have around NME at this punk/new wave dominated time. He wrote the odd record review, but from the mid-eighties onwards seemed to spend most of his time chasing the rights to various songs so that they could be released on tapes sold through NME (four coupons and the like).
The various tapes were pretty good - I still own most of the first forty-odd that were released and I play some of them still. He once told me that he was just waiting for Frank Sinatra to die, as he had a brilliant album of Frank's classics all lined up for release, but it couldn't come out until he was dead. I don't know if it ever did make the light of day once Frank eventually went underground; I bet Roy was on the phone within minutes to the Publisher with the deal ready though!