Music journalism is full of passionate characters, but my friend and former colleague James McMahon, who has died aged 44 after being diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma (a rare form of cancer), could give them all a run for their money.
He was passionate about the bands he liked – often scrappy, DIY ones with a fanbase you could count on both hands. And he was passionate about how the press should cover them. But he was also passionate about much more than music: Doncaster Rovers, zombie movies, Wrestlemania, true crime stories, UFOs, comic books … the list was long.
James was born in Doncaster to Sue (nee Bowes) and Bill McMahon, an engineer. He went to Armthorpe comprehensive school, then Sunderland University for a media and cultural studies degree in the late 90s. He stayed there to do a master’s (2002), and became heavily involved in the thriving indie scene – his band Mavis even earned the honour of being played on John Peel’s Radio 1 show.
When NME began to refresh its stable of writers in the early 2000s, James, with his fanzine background, fitted the bill perfectly. His writing, filed under the pen name James Jam, was funny and energetic – and his championing of new, local artists was exactly what the magazine needed.
Some of these bands were clearly never destined for stardom, but others were: James helped his friends the Futureheads break into the mainstream and encouraged a focus on the north-east music scene from which Maxïmo Park and Field Music emerged.
He and I became friends and allies at the magazine – neither of us could quite believe anyone was paying us to do this. After I left, James was put in charge of breaking new bands as “radar editor” and then became the features editor, memorably interviewing the Gossip’s Beth Ditto when she appeared naked on the cover. He left the NME in 2011 to work at Gamesmaster magazine for a short while before becoming editor of Kerrang! magazine (2011-17).
James was undoubtedly a complex character. As well as being charismatic, funny and thoughtful, he was useless at timekeeping and could be infuriating. He struggled with his mental health and in 2019 received a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder that helped him understand some of the forces that were holding him back. He credited the community around the disorder with changing his life – and was working on a book about the condition at the time of his death. His wife, Kat Kennedy, an artist manager whom he married in 2018, was another source of much-needed stability.
At the start of the 2010s, at James’s behest, I started following Leyton Orient. We bought season tickets and shared one particularly thrilling FA Cup run together. A friend commented how amusing it was that James would seem unfazed meeting musicians riding high in the charts, yet became utterly starstruck in the presence of some journeyman right-back playing in the third tier of the English football league. But that was James.
James’s dad died in 2022. He is survived by Kat, Sue and his brother, Andrew.
