Hello.
I was going to call this Substack / blog / whatever, Broke & Blacklisted, but I decided against it, because I come from a pre Gen Z era in which even when you're really one thing you pretend you're something else. Also, I don't want my current financial crisis to define what happens here. Tonight as I sit here on my tan leather couch in my boxer briefs eating Bran Flakes and almond milk for dinner, surrounded by church candles and the sound of Meat Loaf's “I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)” (RIP), I'm contemplating how it might be that I'm in the same place I was pretty much 15 years ago (except Meat Loaf was still alive and I was definitely not listening to him). Fifteen years ago I was really depressed, sitting on the porch of my parents' house in Glasgow day in day out, after three years of reckless liberation, wondering why I felt so powerless to control my destiny. I contemplated a short memoir called “The Cereal Years” about being rudderless and in my twenties and only getting pleasure and/or sustenance from eating dry Special K out of a box.
It was 2008. I'd graduated from university. The recession hit. I'd read music magazines and passed half my studies with headphones glued into my ears throughout high school, went to Law school at a red brick institution and spent equal amounts of time wiping mascara from my face in bathroom stalls at indie clubs as I did face down in case law at the library. I was going to become an entertainment lawyer, and then I was going to start pupilage to train as a barrister, and wear a wig and gown. Everyone, especially my parents, would be proud. That was until the Lehman Brothers screwed a generation of graduates up with their sub-prime mortgages debacle, and the entire post-graduate job market took a nose dive into oblivion and I had to go back to the drawing board. Staring at my book cases of all of the fashion, rock and film magazines I'd bought and catalogued since about the age of 12, I decided one evening that I was going to be a female Hunter S Thompson except emotionally smart, or like Chuck Klosterman but attractive. I told my Dad I wanted to write about rock bands, and follow them around the world. He showed me a rare Rolling Stones record he had in his collection as some kind of blessing. And with that I started a blog. It was on Tumblr. It was called “Never Miss A Beat”, with “Miss” in a different font, because I was devastatingly aware that women were rare in music journalism 15 years ago. I was trying to be clever.
I remember I wrote something about how I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, and that kind of became my m.o. It became my m.o. as I launched myself at the non-existent job market of magazine publishing. It became my m.o. as I negotiated with offices full of men twice my age who worshipped Paul Weller and The Faces and didn't know what to do with me, a 22-year-old in painted-on skinny jeans, who had just gone to see this internet thing called Grimes do a DJ set in a burlesque bar to five people on a Tuesday night. It became my m.o. as I sat opposite my future boss in a pub called Dirty Dicks and he offered me the job of Deputy Editor at the NME at the tender age of 25, and I contemplated how I was about to be running the biggest music magazine in the world, and my first thought was 'But I've never done heroin!'. It became my m.o. as I walked out of NME's office overlooking the Thames one night two and a half years down the line, and boarded an airplane to LA four days later leaving everything I knew behind and on a one-way ticket to who-the-fuck-knows.
I especially didn't know what the fuck I was doing at that juncture, and then I'd find myself hanging half out of a speeding car on Las Vegas Boulevard with Charli XCX; or flying down San Vicente Blvd backwards in a tour bus while interviewing bipolar frontman Patrick Stickles who had lost control of the brakes; or wondering if I was going to die in Tulum when I was flown in to interview Brandi Carlile and nobody had checked that my accommodation wasn't a brothel; or being carried back to my hotel room in the arms of The Killers' tour manager after I threw up all over the band and their green room at Sam's Town Casino on the 10th anniversary of the album of the same name; or riding in a yellow taxi next to Debbie Harry through the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and realizing I could absolutely not relate to Debbie fucking Harry; or sparring on a Malibu balcony with Kim Kardashian five months out from the 2016 US Election as she told me she hadn't decided who she was voting for yet but was contemplating Trump. When that one printed, and when Kim denied and back-peddled on her blog, and when my editor logged off for the weekend, CNN was calling me on a Friday night for confirmation for prime time news, and – no – I didn't know what the fuck I was doing in that moment, either.
Everything just kept happening, and apparently I was good at adapting, so I got away with an unbelievable amount of chutzpah. When the pandemic hit, I remember in the first week, Playboy – who I wrote regularly for – closed its print title, and I had an early conversation with a former NME colleague who works at a British broadsheet and I said to her, “If that's the end of music journalism for me, I had a helluva run.” I have no idea why I said that. But I think about it often now.
A lot of the people who follow me now know me as the Jewish voice who took a major hit to speak the truth about Jewish identity, Zionism and Israel. You know me as the Jewish voice who was blacklisted for being that kind of Jew. While that is a portion of the truth, I'm not sure how much I like that story as all of it. Here's why. My job is/was a dream. A motherfucking dream! I love the music industry. I love people. I love meeting them. I love the extremities of fame and what it says about the human condition, whether you're sat with a legacy icon at the end of the ride, or you're seeing the hunger in the eyes of a 14-year-old Billie Eilish who nobody's heard of yet. I love discovering the stars of tomorrow before anyone knows who they are, and championing them like they're my football team. I love the art of conversation and mastering it in the corners of grand rooms, or on the floors of dilapidated venues. I love being in a room with a person I disagree with, and recording their worldview, recapturing that with my words and letting them hang themselves. I love how much I learn when I'm just the ghost in the scene, when nobody knows the first thing about me. I love how I got to live out my cowboy American fantasy by traveling this great country through the prism of contemporary music. I traveled the world through the prism of music. I love with passion the way a chorus I haven't quite heard before noodles around my brain for hours, and forces me to write about it and later tell everyone I know to listen. That is who I am. That is who I still am. That is the humanity you don't get to meet when you're seeing my whole life reduced to a hate name on Twitter (Eve Fartlow, if you've been living under a rock). I want to reclaim that voice. Maybe I won't have the access I once did, but I never had the access to begin with, and I still had something to say.
I'm going to be honest, because that's all I know. With this Substack, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I'm back on my parents' porch, and I'm hoping that I can be a companion to you in the world, a fantasist who makes a pipedream work. I can promise you that there'll be things to read, because I'm nothing if not verbose. I can promise you that if you've been wondering how to support my advocacy in fighting antisemitism, then you can subscribe to this and you'll be paying for me to not just combat Jew hate, but continue to do the thing that makes my heart happy. What's the worst that could happen? Most of it already has.
Eve x
I’ve never hit the subscribe button so quickly. Excited to read!
Never parted with money for a subscription as quickly. I, too, have those stories about the music world, especially in Israel where I made it my mission to help push the indie music scene which brought me nights with some of the best known Israeli and international musicians. Besides that, thank you for all you do. It’s a privilege to support you at this time.