In the 1990s, I was a rock journalist striving to assert myself as a young woman, working at the heart of the United Kingdom’s male-dominated music press. I loved my job. I met and interviewed all my favourite bands, and spent my twenties and early thirties in a whirl of parties, clubs, gigs and all-expenses trips to America and Europe.
I began my career through a combination of ignorance, bloody-mindedness, and good timing. With no idea about the protocol of editorial commissions, I was annoyed when a music paper failed to publish my unsolicited live review of a friend’s band. Determined to succeed, I followed a tipoff from an artist who lived in a squat with a media contact (this was London in the 1980s), and soon found myself writing for a bi-monthly heavy metal magazine.
