Interview: John McCready (Music Journalist and Writer)

Growing up in Liverpool and originally writing for NME in the mid-1980’s, John McCready has had a prosperous career as a music journalist and news writer. Having worked for magazines such as The Face and Mojo, he has also worked as a radio presenter and dabbled in TV. He has interviewed music icons such as Depeche Mode, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Janes Addiction and also reviewed David Bowie and Half Man Half Biscuit among others. As well as being a music journalist, John McCready was a Hacienda DJ, in Manchester, in the 90’s.
 I sat down with him to talk about what it was like living in a city in England and growing up in a period where music was not only everywhere, but had an effect on everything, from people’s lives, to youth culture, even to politics.

You grew up in Liverpool during the 1970’s, what was the music scene like in the city at that time?

John: It was something that was in the city and wasn’t in the suburbs, so if you lived in the suburbs like I did, you had to travel to the city to experience it. I remember it being quite violent really, I kind of identified to some extent with the punk idea and if you looked different… we weren’t wearing leather jackets and had spikey hair and stuff, we were wearing old man’s suits and old man’s shoes. So our idea of punk was to dress quite soberly and wander around with books- pretentious books- about poetry in our pockets. We were kind of part of punk but in order to experience that you had to go into the city centre, and if you looked different in the city centre, people would race after you. We defined ourselves also in terms of the music, the music was really important and there was a particular shop in Liverpool at that time called ‘Probe Records’, and we used to hang around there all day and wait for records to come in.

Who were your favourite artists/bands and did you go to see any of them live?

John: I didn’t see any of them live, not as many as I’d like because, in terms of my age I was on the cusp of things. I was 14, 15, 16 years old and probably quite a quiet kid at that age, and I know other kids would go to gigs and there was a club in Liverpool called Eric’s Club, which was associated with punk it had almost everybody who was significant at the time come and play there. You’d find little handbills in shops and it would say things like, ‘Talking Heads, Wednesday Night, 75p’, ‘Blondie £1’, ‘The Clash £2.50’, and these would all be playing there all week and I missed lots of them because my mum wouldn’t let me go into town- only in the daytime to buy records!

Were there any events to do with music that interested you and potentially inspired you to start writing?

John: I didn’t start writing until later really, so when I was writing it was kind of about stuff like The La’s and Half Man Half Biscuit, it would have been like 1985 or 86 that I started for NME doing live reviews. So yeah it was later than the music which I would have loved to have written about. I would have loved to have the opportunity to write about The Clash or the Sex Pistols, or people that you could have seen in Liverpool when I was 15/16 years old.

If you could go back to that decade and interview any artist or any band from the UK or America, who would you pick and why?

John: Probably somebody like Joe Strummer, from The Clash, because it later transpired that he had a lot of ideas around music, and he reflected on music in an intelligent way. He was broad minded about music, in a way that he wasn’t easily contained by the idea of punk. With the third Clash album, London’s Calling, suddenly they explode with lots of different musical influences, you’ve got salsa and disco and hip-hop, all kinds of stuff within those records. Clearly he was trying to fit himself into this tiny little box called punk, but if you could go back and talk to somebody like that about everything that meant something to them, in terms of society and culture it would be interesting.