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Introduction

SO I’VE JUST GOT UP THE STAIRS with my piping hot fish and chips and the phone’s ringing. I put my fish and chips on top of the stove, which hasn’t worked for eighteen months, and think: this better be quick. ‘Yeah?’ I snarl with all the hostility I can muster.

‘Hello, Chris?’

‘Yeah.’ (A sort of three-quarters snarl, jockeying for position.)

‘Hi, it’s Bono here.’

I don’t say: Bono Who?? Neither do I ask him to ring back after I’ve had my chips. I switch into what I consider to be sweetness-and-light mode and thank him for phoning, and we talk about Frank Sinatra. ‘Have you got five minutes? I’ll read it out to you,’ he says. Oh, I think so. The chips can go hang. Because no matter how jaded you are by working around the music industry, or for that matter how jaded you are by Life Itself (big themes! already! yeah!), when one of the world’s most famous rock stars phones you up it is still, frankly, quite exciting. It is more exciting than chips, say.

The absurdity of the situation does not escape me; neither does the thought that he’d be perfectly within his rights to have a moan about one or two of my U2 reviews over the years. Yet he seems to want to talk about his enthusiasm for Frank, and stress the point that however many fans you’re perceived to have acquired yourself, you don’t stop being one, it doesn’t go away, you can still be starstruck.

While some of the contributors to Idle Worship remain rather gloriously starstruck, others remember when they were, with affection or disbelief. Some admit to hideous embarrassment, while others eulogise the inspiration and motivation drawn from leading pop lights. Others go off on berserk ‘irrelevant’ tangents, which is fine by me.

Some time ago I was approached by Philip Gwyn Jones at HarperCollins with a view to compiling a book that ran against the grain of ‘hagiographical, pompous, inane’ writing on modern music. I was very impressed by the word ‘hagiographical’, and, after looking it up, and demanding a rider of Last-Days-of-Pompeii proportions, set myself to the task. This involved innumerable letters and phone calls and becoming The Nag from Hell. Then saying, ‘Yeah, whatever. Sounds good to me,’ whenever a writer or musician got out of bed long enough to call me back and proffer a synopsis. We wanted an eclectic mix of story-tellers and I think I can safely say the diversity herein, by accident or design, is both luscious and arousing. Many PRs were very helpful over the course of this book’s protracted birth. And some were entirely bloody useless. Thanks to the former.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the more established ‘writers’ who delivered the goods most promptly, increasing the literary merit of my letterbox before I could say Smokey Robinson. I am baffled as to how they found the time when they should be doing proper joiny-up writing, but hey, in the world of rock’n’roll there’s no sleep till the typewriter ribbon gets all snaggled. Dreams of Sex and Stagediving author Martin Millar compares and contrasts his experiences attending noisy hairy gigs seventeen years apart, discovering in the process that the Pixies pummel the sweat glands as ferociously as Led Zeppelin fired the awe. After sending me this he rang to see if I could get him on the guest list for Smashing Pumpkins, which proves his reborn zeal knows no bounds. Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby’s secret admiration for the very great Rod Stewart is long overdue for exposure, especially since he once made a veiled reference in a popular magazine to my owning a Genesis album. Still, no-one twigged except me. Any jibes about the Johnny Cougar debut album will however be matched by a ruthless description of the neo-Rod haircut sported in his days as midfield dynamo for the college Third XI. Ah, the joys of the old school tie set-up. When I first discussed this book with Desperadoes author Joseph O’Connor, whose sister is no stranger to the slings and arrows of pop fortune, I was myopic enough to mumble, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if Bob Geldof’s very topical.’ Reading his masterful evocation of a troubled Dublin childhood and adolescence amid a traumatised family I can only humbly admire his sangfroid.

Then strange things arrived from the land that God is asked to bless rather frequently. The golden words of Stephen J. Malkmus, of the intriguing Californian band Pavement, narrate a futuristic fantasy wherein Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is a visionary monk, while lampooning most living artists in any medium. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth gives us a thoroughly uplifting tale of sex and drugs (and possibly some rock’n’roll too) in New York City. ‘It’s fiction,’ he informs me. ‘I suspect you may have to censor the “dirty” language by using asterisks but hopefully this won’t be the case.’ The first time I read this frank take on Breakfast at Tiffany’s filtered through Charles Bukowski, I thought: shame we can’t use it. Then good taste prevailed. The lyrics that close the story come from the Experimental Jet-Set, Trash and No Star LP. Kristin Hersh of Boston’s Throwing Muses recalls how a chronic fear of her father’s Patti Smith records gave way to a fascination with armpits and fingers …

Caitlin Moran has been described as ‘precocious’ more times than she’s been described as ‘an orgasm octopus’, allegedly. The presenter of Channel 4’s ‘Naked City’ testifies to the quivering, jutting, throbbing joys of Suede, as so many young people today are wont to do. What with comedy being the new rock’n’roll (at least at the time of writing, 11.56pm), Robert Newman’s teenage recollection of a chance meeting with the mothers of proto-punk band Crass works on about nine levels, by my reckoning. Cosmic link: the first words Robert ever spoke to me (come to think of it, the only words he’s ever spoken to me) were: ‘You get mentioned in Fever Pitch, don’t you?’ See, it’s all coming together. Which is exactly what I thought when the final part of a serial rant from the inimitable Mark E. Smith of evergreen Manchester mavericks The Fall reached my filing cabinet, the aforementioned dysfunctional stove.

The side-splitting pun of the title Idle Worship attempts to raise the question of whether the growing pains involved in venerating rock gods and goddesses are worth the bother. Should we adore or abhor? Is what we see in our early pop role models a mirror, a mirage or a miracle? There is a war between romance and cynicism in this book, between faith and disillusionment. So it’s just like Tender Is the Night really, okay?

It may have been André Breton who wrote ‘Beauty will be convulsive or not at all,’ but it was Patti Smith who put it on an album cover. It may have been Blondie who sang ‘Dreaming is free,’ but it was me who decided it would be a resonant end to this introduction. Go on, inspire yourself.

CHRIS ROBERTS, April 1994