The most wrong I've ever been?
Why you shouldn't pay much attention to reviewers
At the same time I was a DJ in Sydney, I was also a music critic, reviewing gigs and albums. People would often come up to me at venues and (usually) say nice things about my writing, but I always felt like something of an imposter. I mean, why the hell should anyone care what I thought of a certain record or gig? What gave me the right to be a taste-maker, just because I could string a sentence together? But, every week, my words were read by thousands of people across New South Wales. I wonder how many of them made their music-buying decisions based on what I had declared to be worthy in that week’s edition, and whether they ever regretted it?
Since writing for music publications, I have learnt to almost entirely disregard reviews. Sure, if the vast majority of critics are all saying broadly the same thing, then you can probably take something from that, but an individual review should absolutely be taken with a pinch of salt.
I mean, why should a reviewer’s opinion hold any weight? Just because I love/hate something doesn’t mean you should. I often disagree with reviewers I respect, let alone the ones I don’t. Some treat their reviews as an excuse to showcase just how clever their writing is, or how knowledgeable they are, usually at the expense of making a coherent case. Sometimes they just take a dislike to something seemingly for no real reason.
I tried to always be as positive as possible in my reviews, or at least fair. I think it’s fine to be critical of a piece of art as long as you can justify your opinion. It’s not cool to say something is rubbish unless you can clearly explain why it is rubbish. But I didn’t always manage it. In my live review of the Big Day Out festival in 2007, I declared that Aussie band Jet’s music was so awful that it made me “sad to my very soul”. I genuinely don’t know why I singled them out so harshly and I feel bad about it now as I know them to be nice blokes. Similarly, I once wrote a scathing live review of a now disbanded Sydney group (whose name I can no longer remember), criticising their histrionics and basically saying I didn’t believe anything about them (I hated anything that I considered to be fake or insincere). It was probably my harshest review, and it came back to bite me when I later had to interview the band in person. Safe to say I got quite a frosty reception.
It did highlight a bit of a problem for reviewers in Sydney though. Because the music scene is surprisingly small, everyone knows everyone, making it hard to be objective when casting judgement on a record or a gig. It didn’t take long for me to know pretty much everyone in a band. And most of them were really nice. Giving a bad review to your mates doesn’t feel great.
Anyway, here’s how the process of reviewing albums worked. I would call into the office and pick up a handful of CDs (hello, late-noughties). I’d try to select ones that I thought I would enjoy, because, well, why would I want a CD of a band I didn’t like? Sometimes I was also assigned albums to review.
I would then listen to each record between… say… two and five times and write a few hundred words about them. I would generally start with a bit of context, then a description of the songs/sounds, and finally a conclusion. It wasn’t groundbreaking, and I don’t think that it was particularly helpful to anyone for me to evaluate an album that, a couple of days previously, I had never heard. Some records seem brilliant at first but the appeal soon wears thin, while others take a while to really reveal their magic, but later become firm favourites. It’s impossible to know where your relationship with a piece of art will eventually end up.
A couple of examples: When I first heard Jamie T’s debut album, Panic Prevention, I simply did not know what to make of it. It was a confusing mix of rap, punk and ska, it made my brain hurt and I think I gave it a lukewarm review. But the album stayed with me long after my words were published, and repeated listens ensured that would go on to become one of my favourites of the year. I still like it to this day, nearly two decades on.
And my biggest misstep when it came to reviewing? Get this… I wrote about Adele’s debut album, 19. It’s the one with Chasing Pavements on it. I quite liked the record, but my review contained the most memorably hopeless quote that ever tumbled from my brain. In wrapping up, I said something about how Adele could probably “carve a decent career for herself” if she managed to “avoid the middle of the road”. Is that the most wrong I’ve ever been about music? Definitely. About anything? Maybe! I’ll see if I can dig the full review out and post it at some point.
Talking of reviews, I would love it if you were able to leave a review of my debut book, Long Way Together on Amazon. You don’t have to have bought it from there; you just need to have an Amazon account. I know you haven’t read it yet (because it’s not out until September 14th) but once you have, it would really help if you posted some words about it. Maybe don’t say that it made you sad to your very soul though.