Just Backdated: Melody Maker – Seven Years in the Seventies

Author:Chris Charlesworth

The author joined Melody Maker in 1970 at a time when it was the biggest selling of the UK weekly music papers. He spent a couple of years cutting his teeth and seeing and interviewing most of the big name acts of the time when they visited these shores. However, it was in the summer of 1973 that he got his big break when he was chosen as the paper’s new US correspondent, based first in LA and subsequently in New York. It seemed all his Christmases had come at once, a chance to fraternise with the cream of the US and UK rock scenes while living in an apartment for which all the costs were met by the magazine’s publishers, who also provided a weekly living allowance, allowing his normal salary to accumulate untouched back in his bank account in London. Over the course of the following years he interviewed pretty much everyone who was anyone, while catching all the big gigs from the best seats in the house – it was a tough job but someone had to do it! As well as recalling these events, he quotes extensively from the articles he wrote for Melody Maker at the time, although half a century later the language seems quite quaint and dated now. He certainly lived his life in the fast lane, but of course the gravy train had to hit the buffers at some point. At the beginning of 1977 he got the dreaded phone call recalling him to wintry London. The costs of having a writer based in the US had soared, and the advent of punk in the UK meant interest in what was happening in America had declined, as had Melody Maker’s sales. Within a couple of months he’d seen the way the wind was blowing and decided to move on to pastures new, but he was left with a plethora of vivid memories from those glorious days. This is a very engaging and thoroughly enjoyable memoir – if tales of sex and drugs and rock n roll are your thing then I’d recommend giving it a read.

Length of Read:Medium

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

Those nostalgic for the golden years of the seventies rock world with its private jets and satin tour jackets.

One thing you’ve learned

Charlesworth has plenty of stories to tell of rubbing shoulders with the A List superstars of the time in an era when record companies spared no expense in courting the attention of the weekly music press and the coverage it could provide for their acts.

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