Raising the dead

I went back to the UK last week to bury my friend James. And as I approached the chapel, a frog hit my throat. Who the hell was gonna be there? I knew there would be faces I haven’t seen in a decade. Like the dead resurrected. Icons of the British music press past standing in the pews, like we used to stand down in the aisles of gig venues. Bands. Editors. Other writers. Publicists (PRs are my least favorite… although music PRs aren’t that bad, so long as they work for independent labels). It was like no time had passed, but of course it had because James had jumped on somewhere, like a toad that escaped the lily pad forever. I’ve never been at a funeral where people danced to Nick Cave and the Ramones before cremation. I texted James after. I know – strange.

I turned up and out like a boss for my friend, who never stood for me being bullied by anyone, and certainly wouldn’t the day of his funeral. All that guy wanted was for me to write the shit outta my life, but particularly out of music.

I did write the shit outta music for so many years. Like James did, I love writing. And I love it because of people like James. That’s how you become a writer. He could write like nobody else. You idealize writers and try to get near them and once you have their mentorship you never take it for granted. I never took James for granted. These characters from my past, who were in the pub at the wake last week, these were people who made pages bounce to life because they were all individually larger than it. What you read in the pages of NME, or Melody Maker, or The Face or Smash Hits were the guts of kids – we were all snotty-nosed opinionated obnoxious too cool kids – who only knew that they loved songs. That’s all we needed to know. Even if the songs were unsophisticated to the ears of a hard-nosed elitist critic, the everyday music writer knew that said critic didn’t know how to live if he didn’t get what the lyrics “and after all you’re my Wonderwall” meant. Elitists thought it was nonsense because it wasn’t Proust. It was better than Proust. Oasis is better than Proust. “Wonderwall” meant an entire library of emotions and lessons and histories to the common man or woman. How many bands do that? How many writers capture them doing that? Art. From the poorest council houses of England injected into the veins of millions and counting – pure art.

An old friend at the wake told me he loves my Substack, and it knocked me sideways because I never imagined that this newsletter would make its way to the eyes of the people I once argued about bands with at an 8am morning news meeting (no The 1975 are NOT an NME band). “Fuck writing about music Barlow, you’re doing something that matters,” said my old friend. But, but, I thought. But. We did once do something that mattered. We made songs matter. We made bands matter. Scenes mattered because we stalked them and brought cohesion to tiny towns in forgotten places. That is as important as the mud of the earth. Art, you know? That’s it. Real art. Bruised bloodied throbbing aching art.

I saw so many old faces, so many long lost embraces. Time is like an elastic band. It expands and contracts at whim, but what we’ve had in our past lives, and lord knows I’ve had many of them, it can never be taken from us, can it? All I wanted to do was write. Take that away from me, and I can’t breathe. And people who were envious of me, or afraid of me, did try. Try to take the joy of my career from me. I crawled back from the brink to create this newsletter, and not because I did anything wrong. I just became a problem for bullies, for usurpers, and for people who were in a position to make it harder for me to continue. James was so proud of what I created here. He never let me stop trying to be a writer. He was determined that I kept going.

So I never took a break, or went dark, or disappeared to come back. A year ago today, after years of uphill battling, I decided to go to Israel to see October 7 for myself, and I spent Christmas morning at Be'eri and Reim with survivors. I wanted my writing career back. I wanted my life back. I wanted to be a reporter in the field again. Ever since, I have spent every day, fighting tooth and nail for the truth about Israel and to expose the lies about Gaza. I haven't stopped since October 7 and I won't stop. All I care about is justice and the truth, at any cost; the most important work of my life.

A big story came out this weekend and while I have about 25,000 things I want to say about it, I’m observing for now. It made me think back on my motive for becoming a writer. People like myself only ever worked in music and film journalism because we were so opinionated about music and film that it felt like our lives wouldn’t be worth living if we couldn’t share our opinions about it. I was so passionate about it that I barely ate a meal during my time on a news floor at a music magazine because I forgot I was hungry. I was full up on new demos and gelled hair-dos, and free gig tickets. I was so happy that I could make 12 pence per word in the NME, or however absolutely dire the rate was.

I couldn’t care less about the word rate. That can’t be the motive. That’s why I never wrote about celebrity or for tabloid newspapers. It was so boring to me. Who cares about other people’s lives? Why is there a business in profiting off the private inner carcrash turmoil of spoiled rich kids in mansions with private jets? Who cares about that? I care about Keith Haring’s joy and TS Eliot’s misery, and why The Prodigy were so scary and whether Stevie Nicks has ever written a jaded love song about anyone other than Lindsey Buckingham. For years, I joked that I was the worst journalist in Hollywood for identifying a celebrity. I cannot tell a Kardashian from a Jenner. You may as well tell me it’s Demi Moore after she’s had some more work done.

But not everyone in arts and entertainment is the same. Some people in the wings and behind the curtain have a different array of motivations and are drawn to power and money. Often they ruin the fun for the rest of us. But they never win because real artists cannot die. Art continues blooming in the corners that the bold and the brave have been bullied to hide in. Wait and see.

I will never be able to determine how much of the hate I have received online in these last few years was orchestrated. I'll never know who initiated the hate names, the tens of thousands of memes, the relentless viral misogyny and antisemitism, and the multiple instances of global trending that I endured. I know it was unusual. I know it wasn't an accident. And I know something else that’s even more important: it didn't scare me. I've never been afraid of it. It didn't silence me. It didn't stop me. It never will.

On Yom Kippur, the Jews think about being sealed in the book of life, and we sing about who’s going to live and who’s going to die, as we bang our chests. I always find this notion tremendously stressful; that we are collectively trying to fight for the life or death of our collective in these moments, pleading with G-d, wrestling with our fate. During my years as a journalist, and especially one in Hollywood, I have learned that living and dying is more than just life or death. You can die many times in Hollywood. You can die many times as a music star. You can die so many times as an actor, quite figuratively onscreen. And you can live a hundred times over too. I resurrected myself, and it wasn’t pretty at times, but man do I breath deep and look wide again.

Art matters. What matters less is the conversation. But sadly the conversation has taken precedence. Social media is a demented game for financial gain, power and dominance, and not just as regards entertainment. It’s affecting our news cycles, and the international narrative. Imagine (well, we don’t have to) what’s going on with the Islamic regime’s PR campaign vis-a-vis the war in Gaza, and/or the world’s view on Israel. If only we could get some guru to handle that better for us. But since we don’t have that, we rely on the agents of truth, who together form the fragments of David’s sling, and hit out at the Goliath of disinformation that we contend with every day.

Where others work in suffocating justice, we seek justice. Where others work in malleable falsities, we work in fact. Where others advocate for the devil, while playing God with the lives of others, we remember the laws of science. You cannot inter a living truth. It will rise from where you thought you buried it.

Tomorrow may be Christmas, but it is also the first night of Chanukah. In our great tradition we only ever celebrate the victors. It is the good guys who we commemorate and remember and rejoice, never the bad guys. The bad guys always lose. Remember that. The good guys always win. The bad guys have their moment of fun, but we the good guys have a lifetime of celebration.

Seasons greetings - your Maccabee.