there’s no audience in the world who feels about music as intensely as teenage girls. Maybe their enthusiasm will rub off on me. Maybe I’ll get my passion back for music. Or maybe it will be a nightmare from start to finish.
less
‘I don’t get it, Dave,’ says Izzy, when I call her at work and tell her what I’ve agreed to do. ‘Why teen mags? You know enough people to get yourself some freelance work with proper music mags. You’ll hate it. You couldn’t have picked a weirder mag for a thirty-two-year-old man to work on. You don’t know anything about teen pop music. You hear a catchy chorus on the radio and you act like it’s going to permanently damage your hearing. I’d never heard of a good sixty per cent of the bands you used to write about in Louder and I consider myself quite up to date. In short, you know nothing about teenagers.’
Izzy’s right. Apart from catching ten minutes or so of kids’ TV on Saturday mornings, I’ve paid little attention to the teen world. Occasionally record companies sent various pop offerings by mistake to the Louder office and I’d never even take them out of the Jiffy-bag in which they arrived. Instead I just piled them up next to my desk and when the tower of bubblegum grew tall enough to topple over I’d take them to a second-hand CD shop in Soho and exchange them for cash.
‘I’ll be all right,’ I tell her.
‘Fair enough,’ she says, resignedly. ‘But if you’re going to compromise on this, you should compromise on all your other no-go zones. Ever since you wrote that piece for Femme my boss has been on about me getting you to write a regular “men’s point of view” column for us. I said you wouldn’t do it in a million years but you bloody well can do it now.’
‘How regular is regular?’
‘Every month.’
‘That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’
‘And the column’s going to be called Male Man – you know, as in postman only not quite – and will feature a picture of you looking sufficiently fanciable.’
I laugh and cringe at the same time. ‘You’ve got to be joking – me? Male Man?’
She adds: ‘This is my revenge for all the time you’ve spent thinking about that yucca plant.’
welcome
It’s nine fifty-five on the following morning and I’m standing in front of the revolving glass doors of the Palace Building, 112 Tottenham Court Road, which is home to Peterborough Publishing. A couple of people are outside having a cigarette. They look like journalists. I enter the building and walk up to reception to sign in. There’s quite a big queue of people ahead of me, most of whom I overhear are freelancers waiting to sign in because they haven’t got full security passes. I take a moment to study all of the magazine covers on the wall by the lifts. Peterborough isn’t as big a publisher as BDP but they have quite a few well-known titles. Apart from Teen Scene there’s Stylissimo (women’s fashion), New You (women’s health), Top Wheels (motoring), Burn (Heavy Metal), Metrosoundz (dance music and lifestyle), Gloss (unisex fashion and lifestyle), and finally Grow (urban gardening).
I receive my pass and take the lift to the third floor then walk along a short corridor. I know when I’ve reached the Teen Scene office because the door is plastered with stickers that say things like: ‘Kiss Me Quick, Snog Me Hard!’ and ‘Wow!’ and my least favourite, ‘Hello, Big Boy.’ In the middle is a large poster of Leonardo di Caprio taken from The Beach . Someone has scribbled, ‘Love god,’ across his chest. I feel threatened.
I take a deep breath, open the door and step inside the office. No one looks up. Ignoring strangers in magazine offices is pretty much standard industry so I don’t take offence. Anyway, being ignored allows me to get my bearings. The Teen Scene office is busy: telephones ring, printers spew out pages of copy, and the music of some boy band is playing in the background.
During my survey I
less
‘I don’t get it, Dave,’ says Izzy, when I call her at work and tell her what I’ve agreed to do. ‘Why teen mags? You know enough people to get yourself some freelance work with proper music mags. You’ll hate it. You couldn’t have picked a weirder mag for a thirty-two-year-old man to work on. You don’t know anything about teen pop music. You hear a catchy chorus on the radio and you act like it’s going to permanently damage your hearing. I’d never heard of a good sixty per cent of the bands you used to write about in Louder and I consider myself quite up to date. In short, you know nothing about teenagers.’
Izzy’s right. Apart from catching ten minutes or so of kids’ TV on Saturday mornings, I’ve paid little attention to the teen world. Occasionally record companies sent various pop offerings by mistake to the Louder office and I’d never even take them out of the Jiffy-bag in which they arrived. Instead I just piled them up next to my desk and when the tower of bubblegum grew tall enough to topple over I’d take them to a second-hand CD shop in Soho and exchange them for cash.
‘I’ll be all right,’ I tell her.
‘Fair enough,’ she says, resignedly. ‘But if you’re going to compromise on this, you should compromise on all your other no-go zones. Ever since you wrote that piece for Femme my boss has been on about me getting you to write a regular “men’s point of view” column for us. I said you wouldn’t do it in a million years but you bloody well can do it now.’
‘How regular is regular?’
‘Every month.’
‘That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’
‘And the column’s going to be called Male Man – you know, as in postman only not quite – and will feature a picture of you looking sufficiently fanciable.’
I laugh and cringe at the same time. ‘You’ve got to be joking – me? Male Man?’
She adds: ‘This is my revenge for all the time you’ve spent thinking about that yucca plant.’
welcome
It’s nine fifty-five on the following morning and I’m standing in front of the revolving glass doors of the Palace Building, 112 Tottenham Court Road, which is home to Peterborough Publishing. A couple of people are outside having a cigarette. They look like journalists. I enter the building and walk up to reception to sign in. There’s quite a big queue of people ahead of me, most of whom I overhear are freelancers waiting to sign in because they haven’t got full security passes. I take a moment to study all of the magazine covers on the wall by the lifts. Peterborough isn’t as big a publisher as BDP but they have quite a few well-known titles. Apart from Teen Scene there’s Stylissimo (women’s fashion), New You (women’s health), Top Wheels (motoring), Burn (Heavy Metal), Metrosoundz (dance music and lifestyle), Gloss (unisex fashion and lifestyle), and finally Grow (urban gardening).
I receive my pass and take the lift to the third floor then walk along a short corridor. I know when I’ve reached the Teen Scene office because the door is plastered with stickers that say things like: ‘Kiss Me Quick, Snog Me Hard!’ and ‘Wow!’ and my least favourite, ‘Hello, Big Boy.’ In the middle is a large poster of Leonardo di Caprio taken from The Beach . Someone has scribbled, ‘Love god,’ across his chest. I feel threatened.
I take a deep breath, open the door and step inside the office. No one looks up. Ignoring strangers in magazine offices is pretty much standard industry so I don’t take offence. Anyway, being ignored allows me to get my bearings. The Teen Scene office is busy: telephones ring, printers spew out pages of copy, and the music of some boy band is playing in the background.
During my survey I
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