Monday 10 March 2014

I'm Writing for a Living*

...sort of.  An opportunity came up to write about music via the day job.  That I can do.  I can remember lines from songs that I've never bought such as 'You can suntan', one of the finest rhyming couplets ever.  (It's from Club Tropicana by Wham!)  I can remember stupid trivia about songs like the fact that it's Chaka Khan wailing away in the back of Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love'.  (Why would you put Chaka in the background?  That's gotta be one of the greatest hires ever.)  Ask me what I was doing this time last week, or the date of my sister in law's birthday or anything remotely important and I can't remember it.  I don't understand the way my brain works.
Click on this picture to enlarge it.

My only conclusion is that music is important to me.  We have 6Music on all day at work and I'm lucky enough to work with two blokes who are roughly my age with all the same cultural reference points.  We know that Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love' is one of the greatest records ever made and that it probably invented house music but we equally love 'The Forest' by The Cure and newish things like Jagwar Ma.  We try and guess the year that certain things came out and we speculate endlessly what song titles might be when we can't exactly place them.

People always ask me why I don't write anything for the Mail (where I work).  Until now my answer was that I could never think of anything they'd like.  I couldn't think of any food stories such as 'Yellow Fruit Gives You Cancer/Is a Superfood'.  I couldn't think of any MPs or celebrities that I wanted to have a go at because they held opposing views to my own.  I also quite like the BBC.  Writing the Top of the Pops pages for Mail Plus sort of fell in my lap.  The former scribe wanted more money (and now I'm doing it, I can see why) and the powers that be weren't up for that.   I thought I could do it and I sit next to the person who commissions it.  I did a writing test, they liked it, bingo.
* The money I get for this is about 10% of my salary so writing's not paying for everything just yet.